Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for St. John's East for her question. Her interest in this matter is well known in the House and throughout the province of Newfoundland and Labrador.
This conference has now been ongoing for two years. It has made very substantial progress to the point at which we now have more than 80 per cent of all of the countries participating in New York at the UN conference supporting the proposal endorsed and in some respects authored by Canada for a binding convention that would give us effective rules, transparent rules to govern the ways distant water fishing fleets behave on the high seas.
We hope for a success and a completed conference this year but even if a convention comes in 1995 it will take several years for it to gain ratification.
In the interim we must have effective means to protect those fragile and fast disappearing straddling stocks.