As I said, I credit the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, on the Pacific coast where I have more experience, with attempting diligently to give its various stakeholders an interest, for them to be able to put forward their views.
The difficulty that it has confronted is twofold. First, we live in a new world where different means of communication are now available. Secondly, though, government obviously has an obligation to listen to the public as opposed to listening to the consultative processes that it creates in order to give particular interests input. To me, it's the issue of how you balance that.
Particularly in the case of the Hecate Strait glass sponge reef, the issue was how wide and how high, and how the protection area should be designed. Everyone in the groundfish integrated advisory process wanted that protection to take place.
The argument by the commercial fishing sector—and I'm happy to support them in this circumstance—was that they came forward with a lot of evidence to show that there were ways in which commercial harvesting could continue to take place adjacent to the sponge reefs without damaging the reefs, the issue being the bottom being stirred up, allowing the bottom sediment to drift onto the reef and damage these quite precious structures. As I said, the problem was that the accepted consensus in the Canada Gazette , part I, then disappeared because the government felt it necessary to take into account this additional information.
I understand that government has to take into account all of the information it receives. I'm hoping for some kind of a balance. If you take away from us.... I'm a volunteer and I get paid nothing for my activity, but I devote a lot of time to these processes, as do others, and it's a bit hurtful when all the work you've put into it disappears because somebody else appears to be better at generating Internet-based letters than you were.