Thank you, Mr. Chair.
It's nice to speak with somebody from the other coast. I'm from British Columbia.
We too have been looking at marine protected areas and the impact, on the north coast especially, because some have been put in place up there.
There may be a little clarity needed with respect to Bill C-55. I'm just going to read this. “Clause 5 of the bill amends the Oceans Act to empower the Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard to prohibit certain activities within a marine area of interest...identified for conservation...”.
This is, if you like, an emergency measure to deal with what the department and the people on the ground see as a troubling issue. We could perhaps think back to 1992 when the cod moratorium was instituted in Newfoundland and along the coast. We saw that coming. A provision like this perhaps could have prevented such a drastic collapse of that fishery, when everybody knew that things were under stress and something needed to be done.
The main element of Bill C-55 is to give the minister powers to basically freeze the activities in a certain area, using the precautionary principle, while they look at the elements that may be necessary for a marine protected area sometime in the future. What we heard generally here was an interest in preventing certain things, especially oil and gas exploration and seismic testing, but not so much to change the fishing activities that were going on.
If this provision comes in, although some fishing closures might take place, for the most part, the focus—which at least I heard anyway—is on the extraction industries. If we look now at your areas of interest and your commercial activities, have you noticed any particular changes with respect to what you fish and where you fish, or has it been, if you like, fairly constant over the years?