Thank you for that question.
First of all, I think I've said a lot on the purpose and the changes necessary to ensure that we address all the cumulative effects of fish habitat loss.
With respect to those last proposals, on making sure that the act is a tool for assessing cumulative effects, the bill as you all know proposes adding a public registry. That, we think, is a very useful tool, extremely important for improving the transparency of decision-making within the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, for a whole bunch of reasons.
Also, this registry could be a very useful tool to enable the assessment of the state of fish habitat in a particular lake or estuary. However, it's only going to be a useful tool if we include all the instruments that are relevant to that place. Right now there's a short list of things that will be included, but it won't include such things as habitat that is sanctioned under regulations. In an estuary where there are multiple fish farms, for example, you won't necessarily have that information come up on the registry, and as we know from Tuesday's report of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development there's a big problem with fish habitat and fish farms, particularly in British Columbia.
Those kinds of things all need to be in some place where everyone can see them and where DFO has them all together and can use them as an assessment tool.
Turning to other areas that I haven't had time to touch on and will speak about in our brief, climate change needs to be a consideration in the Fisheries Act somewhere. It's one of the major threats to fisheries production, particularly for species such as salmon, which as you know is of huge concern on the Pacific coast.
Also, we need to ensure that environmental flows are protected under the Fisheries Act as an aspect of fish habitat. My colleague from West Coast Environmental Law spoke a little about that on Tuesday.
We have proposed one particular tool that we think would be quite useful, which is adding a clause to the obstruction provisions to allow for a member of the public to request that an obstruction be removed or that a potential obstruction of fish habitat be investigated, ensuring that DFO would have to at least investigate and respond.
We think this is a nod also to the vastness of Canada and the real challenge we have seen within the department of having enough resources to be out in the world actually looking at what's happening in fish habitat on the ground. We need tools to enable Canadians to participate with DFO in this important job, just because Canada is so big, really.
The final provisions that we think need to be strengthened are those with respect to stock rebuilding. We think it's amazing that those provisions have been introduced in the act as a concept, but we need to make clearer that there are end goals for healthy fish stocks that need to be added into the act, to make that provision more functional for ensuring that stock recovery actually happens.