I'll go quickly.
The main point I want to make here is that Scott Sinclair, who authored a study called Globalization, Trade Treaties and the Future of the Atlantic Canadian Fisheries, cautions that the two policies I talked about, the owner-operator and so on, have been listed in Annex II—though we've not seen the agreement, so I don't know if this is right or wrong. Scott Sinclair maintains this may mean that they are safe for now, but that they can, and he says will, become a target for attack later on. Once they come under attack, they will be referred to the World Trade Organization for judgment, and that means we would have lost control of two policies that are very, very important to rural Newfoundland and rural Atlantic Canada.
Currently there's an initiative under way by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations calling on nations—Canada is a part of this process, I might add—to recognize and protect our small-scale fisheries by adopting the “Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication”, a typical UN-titled paper.
The objectives of the guidelines are “to provide advice and recommendations, establish principles and criteria, and information to assist States and stakeholders to achieve secure and sustainable small-scale fisheries and related livelihoods.” So I call on the drafters of CETA to consult those guidelines and let us remind European countries that they're involved in this process that CETA should be consistent with those guidelines.
In closing, I want to thank you for the opportunity to speak to you, but I have to say that it would have been more enlightening to you, and more in line with democratic principles of Parliament, if you had held your ninth meeting—this is your eighth meeting—in Newfoundland.
Thank you very much.