By all means, thank you very much for the question.
Really, this is one of those situations where the industry was directly contacted by a proponent who intended to put the cable down in the tail end of last year, which was 2021. This was never brought to our attention directly by the department. It was all done by a proponent on a last-minute basis.
We were actually one of the few groups that looked at this and said that we needed to engage in this. We directly engaged the proponent. We provided them with very clear evidence that, first, they were going through a potentially marine protected area, and that, second, they were coming directly through some very important fishing grounds of ours. We really had no idea what the implications of this were going to be. When we were initially contacted, we didn't know whether it was going to be sitting on top or going beneath and what the impacts would be to the values that were identified within that Fundian Channel area.
After this situation developed, we raised it with DFO in an advisory situation. We were promised to have some sort of consultation and discussion. That never actually transpired.
At the end of the day, we received a notice by telephone on a Friday afternoon from somebody in New Jersey that the cable was being installed in the coming weeks. When we reached back to the department on this, we were led to understand that this was because of some international regulations governing the way these communications cables are laid outside of 12 nautical miles.
What we found really quite interesting about this situation was what you brought focus to, which is what was going on in the Fundian Channel. They were able to avoid further scrutiny on this cable that was going through the Fundian Channel because the mitigation measure that was offered was to lay it across the top of the bottom, as opposed to doing any sort of destructive habitat work of sinking the cable underneath the sediments, where it would be protected from incursions due to gear effects, whether it be mobile gear, longline drift or anything like that.
At the end of the day, we were left on the outside, not really understanding how this activity was being permitted to happen or what the impacts were going to be to those conservation values that they had identified in establishing this area of interest that will inevitably become a marine protected area. We also really didn't understand what the impacts were going to be to our actual fishing activities.
This is very similar to somebody laying an extension cord across your driveway and telling you that you'll be responsible for it if you happen to run over it. That was especially troublesome for our members, who are actively fishing, processing groundfish and shipping them to customers around the world.
It was really a bit of a miss on our understanding in terms of what the impacts of the actual program were going to be, what our overall sectoral involvement was to potentially either help guide this cable to be outside of an area of interest—we're working with the department to try to establish an MPA for this—or move it away from our fishing ground, where members are actually out fishing today.
I hope I was able to address your inquiry, Mr. Perkins.