Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for sticking with us here. I'd ask one question of Mr. Stringer or whoever wants to answer it.
I will pick up on this idea of minimum standards, which I asked the minister about earlier. We are setting these MPAs aside for biodiversity, conservation, and endangered species protection. I think everybody would agree there have to be some minimum standards, or why bother doing it?
One of the things you would have to exclude—and I think if you walked down the street and talked to anyone, they would agree—is bottom trawling, which would be like going into a national park with a bulldozer and removing everything from the forest or wherever. We have very small no-take zones in existing MPAs. Scientists tell us that at least 75% of an MPA should probably be a no-take zone. We have evidence from around the world that a lot of the MPAs can't be distinguished from fished areas because they're so poorly managed. I'm wondering why these minimum standards aren't put into Bill C-55.
I'm not talking about things that we need to decide. These are egregious. There might be some resources that we could use, but I think everybody would agree that something like bottom trawling should be excluded from a marine protected area, or why are we doing this in the first place?
What are your plans around that? What would it take to do that? We've heard a lot about enforcement. There are a lot of questions around that and about why we're not setting these minimum standards right off the top.