Thank you very much for those comments.
I think we see very similar things in fisheries in Canada. We export around 90% of the seafood we catch. About 80% of what we eat in Canada is imported seafood, and we know it comes from fisheries that are not as well managed as ours, fisheries where the water isn't as clean and where we don't have labour laws to protect workers.
Canadian consumers should be benefiting and nourishing their bodies from the bounty of our oceans. I don't see much—or anything—in the Fisheries Act that looks at fish as nutrition for Canadians. This is, I think, an oversight. I think it comes from a colonial history, where we've thought about our resources as products to extract to benefit someone far away. We have not thought about the bounty of this land in terms of the people here.
I agree that in the act we lack protections that look at fisheries as a food source for Canadians. I think protecting harvesters and putting the power into the hands of harvesters to have agency over where they're selling their catch would go a long way to feeding Canadians. If the vast majority of our licences and quotas are owned by large export-oriented companies or foreign entities, we've given up our resource even before we've given Canadians the opportunity to nourish themselves with fish.
It is absolutely within the purview of this act to protect the fish in our waters for Canadians not only to harvest and benefit from, but also to nourish themselves all across the country.