Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you to our witnesses for appearing here today. I know that some of you have been here several times before committee.
The fisheries is no doubt a complicated file and a complicated department. When you look at what our fisheries have done, especially on the east coast.... I'm from Newfoundland, and 26 years ago, it was the northern cod moratorium. Today we still look at that stock, and it's well below the critical zone 26 years later. I didn't know much about the fishery until I came here in October 2015, and it was a quick learning curve. It seems to me that for decades—and I don't know how many to go back—successive governments have done a very poor job of, one, managing fishery stocks, and two, implementing a rebuilding plan.
Other areas around the world.... I'll use Norway as an example. It had an issue with its cod stock, and it rebuilt it in six or seven years. We seem to not catch up or something, or we just think it will do it on its own without any help. Part of the bill is to provide better certainty for industry. What's that certainty going to look like? What are we going to do to provide better certainty for the people involved in this industry?