Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for her submission today. I agree wholeheartedly with what she had to say. The one point she made which I certainly support is the fact that the only thing the government can do in this bill which it cannot do in existing legislation is to extinguish the public right to fish. That may not seem like much but let us look at the implications of it.
Clause 17(1) says:
Her Majesty in right of Canada, represented by the Minister, may enter into a fisheries management agreement with any organization that, in the opinion of the Minister, is representative of a class of persons or holders.
What does that mean? It means in the first instance that the public right to fish is eliminated. The minister now will control the resource. He will be able to say to his friends that they have the right to capture a certain amount of the fish stocks and that is just the way it will be. There is no appeal when something like that happens.
For instance, he could go to a lodge owner who was a good contributor to his party-and I am not suggesting in any way, shape or form that the current minister would do this, but it opens a door for someone to do this kind of thing in the future.
Some minister in the future who lacked a sense of fair play and what is right and wrong could come to a friend who was a great contributor to himself or to his party and say: "I'll give you 20,000 fish to harvest" and that would be it. It would be a fait accompli.
The bill says as well in clause 19:
The Minister shall publish a fisheries management agreement in the manner he sees fit.
Therefore, he does not have to tell you and I that he has given this other individual 20,000 chinook to harvest. He does not have to tell anybody, except it states in clause 18 that before a fisheries management agreement is entered into, notice of it shall be given to the holders or persons likely to be subject to it.
The only people he has to tell are the people who are liable to catch the fish. In the instance of a sports fishing lodge operator he lets the guys know who are coming to his sports lodge that yes, they can catch these fish because he has this agreement with the minister that gives him the right to do it, but the public does not have to know.
How does that affect us? If we take my friend from Labrador who spoke earlier or we take into consideration my friend from Vancouver South who spoke of his history of two trips out sports fishing, what that means is that they could be barred from fishing simply because somebody else has been secretly given the right to catch those fish.
The impact is on the public. It is on the individuals. It is on you and me and anybody else who wants access to that resource. We will lose it. We lose access to the resource.
The member for Vancouver Quadra said here the other day that we did not understand the section of the Magna Carta that dealt with the public right to fish because we did not speak the language that the Magna Carta was written in, so how could we understand it. He was casting aspersions on the Supreme Court of Canada because as recently as last August in the Gladstone case the supreme court acknowledged that the public right to fish has existed since the time of the Magna Carta. That public right can only be extinguished by competent legislation, in other words by legislation which passes through this House.
How the hon. member for Vancouver Quadra could say we cannot justify the public right to fish and the existence of that with reference to the Magna Carta is beyond me. The Supreme Court of Canada can do it and certainly we can too.
What happens if we extinguish that public right to fish and we give the minister the authority to dispense fish to his friends? We open the door to all sorts of secret arrangements and pay-offs, pay-offs from the public purse so to speak, from the public treasury. This is a resource owned by all Canadians yet it could be doled out and given to whomever the minister sees fit, to whomever he wants to make that donation. That is totally unacceptable. It is something I do not think the people of British Columbia can tolerate. It is certainly something that this House should not tolerate as well.