Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
As you said, my name is Scott Parsons. I worked for 34 years with the Government of Canada, most of it with the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans in various capacities. For the last 18 years of my career, I was an assistant deputy minister in the department, responsible at various times for fisheries management science and for oceans, including the development and passage of the Oceans Act of 1997, which embodied the concepts of ecosystem management and precautionary approach that the previous speaker alluded to this morning. That was done in 1997 and passed by the Parliament of Canada. Also, I was chief scientist of the department for a number of years, and for three years I was president of an intergovernmental marine science organization that spanned the North Atlantic.
Since I retired, in my involvement in this particular issue of NAFO, in 2005 I conducted a review of NAFO for the advisory panel on straddling stocks. That report was severely critical of NAFO, describing it as a toothless tiger and concluded that NAFO was broken and that nothing short of radical reform would suffice. By that point, around 2005 or 2006, there was a general consensus in Canada that NAFO was broken and needed to be fixed, and today we're here discussing these amendments, which were originally an attempt to do that.
How did we get to the point we are at today? As one of the honourable members referred to previously, in 2006 the current government, before coming to power, made a fairly bold commitment with respect to how we would deal with this issue. It stated that it would extend the 200-mile limit to the edge of the continental shelf, the nose and tail of the Grand Banks, and the Flemish Cap in the North Atlantic and would be prepared to exercise Canadian custodial management over this area. So when the new Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, the former minister, Mr. Loyola Hearn, came to office, he was then under significant pressure to implement this commitment. After prolonged discussions, however, the focus shifted to making improvements to NAFO rather than implementing what was traditionally thought of as custodial management. The negotiations that have been referred to commenced and were known as NAFO reform.
Through bureaucratic bungling, the union negotiators were able to seize control of the drafting pen, and in any negotiation he who has the drafting pen is in an advantageous position. It allowed them to put proposals on the table and put Canada in a reactive position and forced to give ground time after time in the negotiations.
Why are we in the mess that we are now with this package of amendments, and we do think it is a bad set of amendments? It is really because the Canadian negotiators did not have the option to walk away from the table. Why didn't they have that option? Because the negotiators were under enormous political pressure to develop a deal at any cost that could be portrayed as fulfilling the 2006 commitment. This is demonstrated by the fact that once the package of amendments was agreed to, former Minister Hearn, in a press release, claimed that Canada had become the custodian of the resources outside 200 miles. And in 2008, the government would go even further in its election platform to say that it had, and I quote: “assumed custodial management of the fishery in the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO) regulatory area”. We would certainly question this claim.
In reality, we think that the negotiators have failed to achieve any fundamental reforms in these proposed new amendments. The proposals are in fact a charade, a game of smoke and mirrors. They fall far short of making NAFO more effective and will create substantial new problems. In particular, as alluded to earlier, they will undermine Canada's ability to maintain sole control over fisheries management in the Canadian 200-mile zone. Overall, the package of amendments is fatally flawed, and we call on you to urge the government not to proceed with ratification and, instead, embark upon a new process.