If I can explore this a little further, at risk of outing myself as an enormous nerd, when we start looking at the freedom of the high seas and going back to 16th century Dutch philosophy, I don't think we can properly enforce anything that's taking place on the high seas. However, if we got to a stage where we could actually say foreign vessels have to abide by the same standards and if we had an effective enforcement mechanism in Canada, is their ability to operate more or less how they want outside of Canadian waters still going to render Canadian-flag ships uneconomical?
On September 13th, 2017. See this statement in context.