Mr. Speaker, in Dartmouth last September NAFO established a total allowable catch of 27,000 tonnes of turbot for 1995. In announcing the NAFO agreement, the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans assured Parliament that "Canada will have for the first time the right to board and inspect the vessels catching turbot and to ensure that the proper rules are being followed to conserve this important stock," something he has failed to do.
On February 1 NAFO met to allocate the 27,000 tonne catch. The practice for such decisions is to seek consensus because members have the right to object to decisions and withdraw. Against the advice of members who would later support Canada, the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans forced a vote on a Canadian proposal for quota allocation. The resulting agreement gave Canada 60 per cent of the catch, up from about 10 per cent. The European Union got 12.5 per cent, down from about 75 per cent of the catch for the previous three years.
The Minister of Fisheries and Oceans has made every effort to make his dispute over the allocation with the EU into an exercise in eco-aggression. As the Financial Times of London noted:
The fact that Canada had tried to garner such a large proportion of the quota-some 70 per cent against 12 per cent for the Europeans-somewhat tarnishes the country's claim that it had to intervene to save the fish from impending extinction.
Tony Pitcher, director of the Fisheries Centre at UBC said: "Canada's newly acquired 60 per cent share of turbot was a radical shift in allocation that came too quickly for some fishing nations to accept willingly".
In our desperate need to find a hero out of all this bumbling and blustering, we ignored the fact that the Estai had been boarded for inspection by Canadians 11 times since January 1994. On each of those occasions Canadian officials could have and should have inspected the holds and found evidence of baby fish being caught. They could have and should have waited until the net was hauled in and discovered the liner.
The only advantage to the bumbling and bluster has gone to the Spanish who can now fish without fear of inspection. With the arrest of the Estai , the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans lost the ability to board and inspect foreign trawlers fishing in the NAFO regulatory area beyond our 200-mile limit.
The size of the fish on the Estai should not have been a surprise. They were consistent with the catch reported by Spanish and Portuguese trawlers in 1993 and reported in NAFO scientific papers in 1994. Those papers report a shockingly steady decline in biomass from about 225,000 tons in 1984 to 37,000 tons in 1992 and that few fish larger than 46 centimetres were sampled in the 1993 catches. Considering that sexually mature turbot will be at least 60 centimetres long, it is questionable whether we should have agreed to fish turbot at all this year, let alone try to out-manoeuvre the EU for a larger allocation.
On the Flemish Cap we now have the worst of both worlds, neither NAFO inspection by Canada nor enforcement of the new regulations. On March 3, 1995 when the regulations were enacted we were told they were essential to deter overfishing by Spanish and Portuguese fishing vessels on both the nose and tail of the Grand Banks and the Flemish Cap.
The 1994 NAFO Scientific Council report cautioned that since the turbot is a single stock, it is necessary to regulate both the nose and tail and the Flemish Cap. To fail to do so, in the words of the report, could lead to the collapse of the fishery.
The March 3 regulation prohibited Spanish fishing on both the nose and tail and on the Flemish Cap. Since the regulation became law, the government has backed off, leaving the Flemish Cap exposed to unregulated fishing.
The test of the government's action is whether it advances the protection of turbot stocks in the NAFO regulatory area on both the nose and tail of the Grand Banks and the Flemish Cap. The question is, why did Canadian officials fail to carry out adequate inspections of the Estai and other Spanish fishing vessels?