Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Welcome to our guests, and thank you for coming back again on such a short turnaround visit.
For decades, and maybe since the beginning of time, we've used the ocean to some regard improperly. With successive governments, not this one or the last one, but governments going back to when Canada was formed, probably, it seems that for all that time we haven't paid close attention to what we're doing with regard to what we're taking out of the water and what we're allowing to go into the water and the activities associated with that.
I refer back to the cod moratorium in Newfoundland some 25 or 26 years ago. A year or so before the moratorium came into place, we were still issuing large quotas. We knew that everybody was saying the stock was in desperate shape, yet we were still issuing huge quotas to be taken from the water. How does this act address all that neglect and mismanagement? Mismanagement is probably the wrong word, but it's a word that fits for now.