Today in the Maritimes—this is pretty good news—the fisheries officers walked off due to political interference, an unsafe workplace and a bunch of other things. They're treated very similarly to the commercial fishers in Nova Scotia, which isn't very well, to be honest with you.
PPSC, the Public Prosecution Service of Canada, constantly interferes with all cases to do with commercial fishing. Commercial fishing officers can charge us any time they want to, which is necessary in many cases. If fishermen are out of line, they need to be charged, but often the fishermen I look after are charged with clerical errors, right down to dockside monitors not entering their reports on time. Fisheries officers come down, convict them and treat them as criminals. Yet, on the contrary, we have no strictures on our biggest power producer, Nova Scotia Power, for not wanting to comply, and a blind eye is turned every day.
They kill fish on a constant basis. We report it; they don't report it. They don't get charged for not reporting it. It's in the act. It's very clear, so there's a discrepancy in the application of the act. There's a big discrepancy. Anything other than fishing has to go through a different process, and anything rights-based has to go through a different process. They just drop the hammer on commercial fishermen, regardless of what it is for.
There are no conservation concerns on many things but, at the end of the day, there's a big discrepancy in how this act is administered. Fish and fish habitat protection in Nova Scotia is non-existent. There hasn't been a charge in 13 years that I'm aware of. We ATIPed this six months ago. There may have been a charge in the last six months, but the last one was a logger—those guys are low-hanging fruit, like we are—and they think it's acceptable to do that.
You don't even have to listen to me; you just have to look at the facts. Look at what's going on. A simple ATIP will show who's being charged, and Canadian prosecutors are not putting forward these charges to convict people. It's very out in the open if you start looking.