Mr. Speaker, I could say right away that, indeed, I am pleased to rise in this House to speak to the bill of the century, since we are talking here about reviewing legislation that dates back almost to 1868. However, I must say first that the bill of the century is badly structured. I am surprised to see that the fisheries and oceans minister took only 15 minutes in this House, yesterday, to deal with a bill of the century.
You will understand all the fears and all the concern that one may have about such a bill when one sees that the fisheries minister gives so little time to such a bill, the bill of the century.
I could add that, despite the fact that the minister seems to give it so little time, I appreciate the relevancy and the usefulness of reviewing and updating legislation dating back to Confederation. Unfortunately, instead of taking the opportunity to solve the serious organizational problems within the fishing industry, the federal government is presenting us with a bill containing major deficiencies.
I will have the opportunity this afternoon to instruct my other colleagues in the House. The Bloc Quebecois hopes that, this time, the Liberal government will be able to show a little more judgment
and will accept to put partisanship aside to make Bill C-62 acceptable to fishermen.
This act being about fisheries, there is a need to get the fishing industry, the fishermen, to see it as good piece of legislation. It is important to do a good job about it, especially if no changes are to be made to the legislation for another century.
I must say that, until such time as major changes have been made to the bill, the Bloc Quebecois will oppose the principles set out in this bill for reasons I will explain later.
For the benefit of my hon. colleagues and our audience, I would like to say that Bill C-62 has four parts. Part I deals with fisheries conservation and management; it creates a work system. Part II is about fish habitat conservation and protection, and pollution prevention; it contains a series of measures allowing the legislator to achieve his goal.
Part III is administrative sanctions. Two fisheries tribunals would be established to look after the administration and implementation of the administrative sanctions. Finally, part IV of the bill deals with administration and enforcement. Basically, part IV describes the working of the administration.
I told you how shocked I was when I saw the botched job the government had done with its fisheries legislation. I would like to start my remarks by recalling the three main reasons why Bloc members will vote against Bill C-62 at second reading.
First of all, we disagree with the approach taken by the minister in relation to fisheries management agreements. These agreements are covered by part I of the Fisheries Act. Second, as the bill stands, not enough powers are being delegated to the provinces, which flies in the face of the management agreements provided for in the same act. I will explain a little later.
The third reason why we disagree with and will vote against this bill has to do with Part III concerning the establishment of fisheries tribunals to manage administrative sanctions. These tribunals are a smoke screen that will allow the minister to maintain control over sanctions. Those are the three reasons why the Bloc Quebecois will oppose Bill C-62.
I would not want to overlook another reason related to Part II, which deals with habitat conservation and protection, but I will let my colleague from Laurentides tell you about this later. I think that Part II as drafted by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans directly encroaches on environmental matters under the jurisdiction of the provinces, including Quebec. I will let my colleague elaborate on this.
To get back to the heart of my speech, I will try to explain the reasons.
I spoke to you earlier about management agreements. We did not think the minister should propose management agreements. For the benefit of the members present in this House and the people listening to us, I could perhaps quote part of clause 17, whose title is "Fisheries Management Agreements".
Subclause 17(1) provides that:
- (1) 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.
That is to say, licence holders. It is not known whether the clause refers to licence holders or fishermen, but the word "persons" is used.
What I find greatly irritating-and I fear the fisheries sector will feel the same way-is the discretionary nature of subclause 17(1), which specifies right away that fisheries management agreements can only be signed by the organizations or individuals invited to do so by the minister.
In my view, this bill shows a dichotomy. A little further in the documentation on the new fisheries act, a link is made between fisheries management and partnership agreements. Mention is made of a partnership with the fisheries community. Well, partnership should equal transparency. There is an obligation to earn the trust of those they want to work with.
If, at the outset, the minister has the discretion to decide who he will invite to take part in the management agreement, the whole thing seems to be unfair, it is not fair play, as we say in the industry, for the other partners or players sitting at the table. Those people do not know who will be invited and when.
In other words, the minister always knows who will be invited, but at any time he can come out and bring another partner into the management agreement and that is when he could jeopardize the beginning of the partnership set up by the players already involved. This is the first problem.
I want to stress this issue because we are at the very beginning of the revival of the groundfish industry. What I am trying to say about subclause 17(1) will be seen as a precondition to the revival of the cod fishing industry. Let me explain.
The fisheries resource advisory council recommended quotas representing, year after year, close to 10 per cent of the catches registered previously. This means that not everyone will be able to start fishing again at the same time. It means that someone will have to decide who will start fishing and who will go first.
So, the first problem I see with this so-called bill of the century, since the old one was passed 100 years ago and needs to be modernized, is that the minister will have to make a recommendation in mid-December.
How is it that he did not take advantage of the tabling of his bill to at least write a clause somewhere to tell us that the minister or the cabinet, the executive body of government, could establish the rules to determine parameters thereof. There is absolutely nothing on that subject. If we are not able to plan for the short term, it will be at our door tomorrow morning, or almost, how can we expect to live another hundred years with something that is still at the minister's discretion, since the delivery of licenses is still just as discretionary? It was a ministerial privilege.
Fishermen will need to know that and that it is not visible.
I always make a comparison with the reopening of the cod fishery, which many are hoping for next spring, after the moratorium established in 1993 by the department.
When the moratorium was established, the department talked about a rationalization of fisheries. Fishermen said that maybe the way to do so was to make their trade a profession. Fishermen put a lot of work into that issue. There is nothing in the bill about a legislative framework for professional status.
Surely the multitude of officials surrounding the fisheries minister have undoubtedly heard the fishermen's demands; how is it that there is not one iota of this in the bill or a reference to the fact that it will be done soon. No, there is nothing at all.
You will note that I find that, in the first paragraph only, the minister should have mentioned two little things, that is, professional status and a definition of the essence of fishing. He could have told us in this clause how he sees the future, but no, there is nothing about that either.
In the same perspective-and I would like to help people see whether the minister is clear or not and whether he has understood the wishes of the fishing community-when a moratorium was imposed on the cod fishery, fishermen said that, when that fishery would reopen, they would like more versatility. What did it mean? It meant that they would be able to catch different species, which seemed logical to me since there is always a risk of accidentally catching other species.
However, when we are talking about management agreements, we are talking about a group of individuals who will be invited to develop management measures for a particular fishery and to harvest that resource. How will people who are not part of the group be allowed to join in? Will it be by designation or on the minister's discretionary advice? If such is the case, what confidence will the people who developed the agreement have in this agreement? I am not talking about excluding people. I am just asking how new people will be included in such a group. There are methods for doing that, and I will be happy to give the minister a course on that subject.
I want to raise a second point with regard to these management agreements. Paragraph 17(2)( d ) refers to the obligations, responsibilities and funding arrangements with respect to management of the fishery. But just before that, paragraph 17(2)( c ) says that Canada or Her Majesty may collect fees for the issuance of licences.
That is exactly what Nova Scotia fishermen are contesting right now with regard to the lobster fishery: the increase in their fishing licence fees. All fishermen in Canada know that fishing licence fees have been raised by 300, 500 or even 1,000 per cent in some cases.
These increases have hurt fishing communities and have had a devastating effect on the economic activity in these communities because that is money taken out directly from their economy.
In clause 17(2)( d ) of the new bill, the minister immediately announces that, in order to have access to a particular fishery, you will now have to sign or you will be invited to sign a partnership agreement, but, on top of that, you will have to pay new fees related to management and protection of this resource. As it stands, this does not resolve any of the fisheries' organizational problems, but it does one heck of a job of resolving the department's financial problems.
The minister has come up with this clause, and this bill, to sort out his own problem of organization. He sets up a screen, he appoints a committee, he can add as many players as he likes, and to cap it all he sends them a bill.
What is the benefit to fishermen in all this? How does it help the fishery? I repeat, it is the statute of the century. The last one was written in 1868; it is now 1996 and we are about to be taken to the cleaners.
With respect to financial costs alone, I would like to give the example of the partnership agreements signed last year with respect to the crab fishers in zone 12 of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Traditional crabbers worked like fiends, I have to say, with Fisheries and Oceans officials over a long period of time. They were working on a partnership agreement.
But last February, the new fisheries minister blunders in and says "That has to go". What happened? He brought in new players. I am not contesting the right of new fishermen to come into this fishery. What I have a problem with is the cavalier manner in which the minister has acted. How can the traditional crabbers in the example
I have just given trust a minister who scraps a partnership agreement worked out by his own department. He is the boss, after all.
And the crab fishermen. He brought in a new breed of shore fishermen by the back door. I do not have anything against this, but as I said with respect to clause 17(1), there must be a mechanism setting out under what circumstances new players will be allowed to join, something transparent for those around the table.
Imagine, the crab fishermen were preparing, for this year alone I believe, to pay $500,000 to Fisheries and Oceans in shared management costs. That is a lot of money. These people were going to invest money without knowing how much ministerial honesty and transparency there would be. If history repeats itself, how do you think the fishermen will react? How will they react to the minister's present request for a blank cheque?
I would like to raise another small point. I have spoken of the first item: our position with respect to the way in which the minister proposed the management agreements. I offered you some examples to explain our opposition.
Now, I would like to speak about why we are opposed to the wording of the clause concerning delegation of power to the provinces, delegation I would characterize as insufficient and contradictory.
In this connection, I would just like to point out that, at present, the minister or his department is in the process of working on an agreement in principle with British Columbia, precisely for the purpose of reviewing the division of powers. Yet, with respect to the division of powers referred to in the June press release over the signatures of B.C. minister Glen Clark and the present federal Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, they indicated that everything was on the table and negotiable.
The delegation of power described in the present bill refers only to transferring licensing, with the added bonus of any charges that might be collected.
This is insufficient, if we are going to be coherent with respect to fisheries-and I believe the B.C. Premier was when he said: "Now then, if we want to look at what is happening with respect to fisheries, we must lay everything out on the table: licensing, conservation, administrative rules. Coherence is necessary, for at present, as everybody knows, a live fish is federal, but a dead fish is provincial". We must work to ensure that this industry has all the same tools in its tool chest. When delegating, you cannot delegate just the doorknob; you have to delegate the whole door, with hinges, lock and key.
I gave the example of British Columbia perhaps for fear of being criticized for talking about Quebec all the time. I will remind the House immediately that, at the Victoria conference in November 1994, Quebec too asked for more power over fisheries.
If time permits, it may be a good idea to remind all the hon. members in this place and the public as well of what Quebec publicly requested and is still requesting, as repeated by Quebec fisheries minister Guy Julien just recently, one or two weeks ago. This public position has been reiterated.
Regarding stocks captured completely and entirely by its residents, which basically means inshore species, Quebec was asking for full administrative responsibility for fish stock assessment, preservation or management policy development and issuing of licences on the basis of allowable harvesting levels, as well as control and monitoring of its fisheries.
To be effective in an area such as this one, you have to take a top-down approach.
Furthermore, it was requested that the related budgets and positions be transferred along with these responsibilities. This is the kind of issue that can easily be settled through the transfer of tax points. The Quebec fisheries minister was reaching out. Looking at the federal minister's bill, I notice that he is trying to resolve some financial problems. But Quebec's proposal would have resolved both these financial problems and structural problems in fisheries.
The other items requested by Quebec were that, regarding underexploited fish stocks and stocks captured by residents of more than one province, the federal government assume responsibility, directly or through special agencies, for resource assessment as well as the control and monitoring of the use made of this resource. As far as these stocks are concerned, the preservation mandate should go to an independent agency with decision making authority set up by the federal government.
The Atlantic provinces and Quebec would designate representatives from their respective industries as well as government representatives to this agency.
Again, regarding the stocks caught by several provinces, point ( b ) calls on the federal government and the provinces to establish a multilateral process for determining provincial fleets' access to fish resources. In other words, the quotas would be set before the fleets went out to sea. This would be a good way of settling matters, of being proactive. I think this kind of approach is occasionally needed.
Under point ( c ), Quebec would be responsible for distributing its share of the stocks among its own residents, and receive related budgetary appropriations.
In other words, Quebec's minister of fisheries offered to resolve many of the issues for his federal counterpart as long as he had the powers to do so. In this regard, I am still in a good position to say that the provinces may be better able to resolve fisheries-related problems, since last spring-to get back to the example I used
earlier-the current federal minister of fisheries was unable to even make a dent in the troubles in the crab fishery.
I would suggest that he even poured oil on the fire by refusing to meet with the parties in the fishing industry who could not come to an agreement.
Who restored public peace? Quebec's minister of fisheries, Guy Julien, and New Brunswick's minister of fisheries, Mr. Thériault, who bore the brunt of the fishermen's and factory workers' discontent. The windows of his house were smashed.
It was not his area of jurisdiction but he had to settle the matter himself. If there is any desire to be in the least consistent, when the minister dares-either out of naivete or because people are thought to be foolish enough to swallow such a thing-to draft something like clause 9 on delegation of powers, with its insufficient description of powers, when this spring he needed his provincial counterparts to settle his problems, this is a real shame.
Still relating to the delegation of powers to the provinces, I would also like to draw the attention of the minister, the members of this House and the public, to the contradiction between a desire to delegate powers to the provinces, as stipulated in clause 9, and reference to fisheries management agreements as set out in clause 17.
In clause 9, what is delegated is not the power to issue licences and to collect fees. Clause 17 on fisheries management agreements is not subject in any way to clause 9. Thus, what will those provinces wishing to take advantage of clause 9 have to administer if, in another forum, the federal level, via its present Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, is signing partnership agreements with those he himself designates, and who in his opinion represent the fisheries? What power does he delegate to the provinces? An empty shell.
I am getting carried away, but I see time is flying, and I would not like to leave you without speaking of the third point which is an irritant to myself and the Bloc members, part III of this bill which addresses the creation of a Fisheries Tribunal, which I have just now described as a smokescreen for the minister.
The purpose of part III, as described under the establishment of tribunals, was to prevent Fisheries and Oceans, both the department and the minister, from being judge and jury, in other words, from hearing evidence that a fisherman had committed fraud or violated a fishing regulation and then imposing the sanction right away.
I think that under any civilized system, every accused person is innocent until proven guilty. What is being proposed here is this: the fine will no longer be imposed by the regional directors of Fisheries and Oceans, oh no, but by people we are going to appoint. The minister is going to appoint people for a period of three years; he will give them guidelines.
What is the difference between appointing a representative who works under the supervision of the minister according to the minister's guidelines, and the current regional directors of Fisheries and Oceans? I do not see the difference. Perhaps the Liberals do. The difference is that they will be able to appoint their friends to these positions. That is obvious.
In fact, the only two criteria for being appointed judge of these tribunals is-