But this is an amendment so it is quite in order.
I would like to reiterate that this bill is still dressed up as modernization. This bill gives the minister and thus the senior bureaucracy all the power they could ever possibly want to reward their friends and consolidate their strength and powers. This is known on the west coast for certain and in other jurisdictions as the most top heavy and arrogant bureaucracy in the federal government. It is amazing to me to see how the consolidation of powers in this bill can be characterized as modernization.
There is a major collision of events happening right now on the west coast. There is a federal-provincial set of negotiations going on in an attempt to translate some of the current jurisdictions of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans into a provincial mandate. We have a federal-provincial fisheries impact review board that is probably reporting today as we speak. We have the results from a very precedent setting federal court case in Vancouver that is very interesting. I would like to speak a little about that in a few minutes.
The halibut advisory committee process that dealt with halibut licensing on the B.C. coast several years ago was under scrutiny. Department of Fisheries and Oceans personnel came out looking very bad indeed. They confirmed what many in the industry, many people familiar with the actions of the senior bureaucracy have believed for some time and now we have it in black and white.
At a time when all these events are happening we have the implementation of what is known as the Mifflin plan on the west coast. This has been a major disaster for outlying communities in British Columbia in the way it was implemented and the buy back scheme that was put in place. There is a growing perception that we have an out of control, uncaring bureaucracy and department really doing a disservice to the west coast.
We already know what management has led to on the east coast. With that example as a precedent, the people in British Columbia want to avoid that at all costs. It is a very important industry, recreational, commercial and sport fishing.
I would like to state very clearly for the record that there is nothing in this new fisheries act that the minister and the department cannot do under the existing act except extinguish the public right to fish. The central and deplorable change with respect to fisheries management is that the minister gains new unfettered powers to do what currently requires the specific authorization of Parliament or cabinet. For a minister and department that have singlehandedly mismanaged this resource so completely to be handed even more absolute power would be a derogation of the trust placed in us as Parliamentarians.
It is further testimony to the government's inability to manage and allocate a resource and to honour its historic common law regarding the public right to fish.
It replaces the public right to fish with private fishing agreements or what the bill calls partnership agreements. These fishing agreements would be similar to the aboriginal fishing agreements the government currently enters into with native bands. The native only commercial fishery was recently undermined by the supreme court's decision on Van der Peet in 1996, NTC Smokehouse in 1996 and the Gladstone decision in 1996.
The court ruled specifically against an aboriginal commercial right to fish, saying they had no right to an exclusive fishery: "B.C. natives do not have a constitutional right to catch and sell fish commercially". Here we go again, more appealed decisions leading to supreme court rulings in order to bring the bureaucrats and their captive minister to their senses.
Bill C-62 does not address the real problems in the fishery, for example declining stocks, problems with Alaskan interceptions and the need for strict enforcement for conservation measures.
There is a growing awareness in the public that the present fisheries act does not give the minister the authority to enter into exclusive fishing arrangements. There are some simple solutions to the problem. Clear criteria ought to be established for the transfer of fisheries management to the provinces should the provinces want that authority. Fish do tend not to notice political boundaries.
I would like to mention some specifics about a very important case that really has not received much attention. On November 14 in Vancouver Judge Campbell finally came down with a decision. The plaintiffs in this case were halibut fishermen who felt they had been aggrieved by the process and that the minister had exceeded his authority in respect to the way in which halibut licences were reallocated from what is called a shotgun fishery, where all licence holders know the season and everyone goes out to catch what they can in the allotted time. It was changed from a shotgun fishery to an individual transferable quota. In the process of consultation leading up to the issuance of these individual transferable quotas there were a lot of things which came to light in the court case.
The plaintiffs are really saying that this was a rigged exercise, that the department had a predetermined agenda and that there were going to be winners and losers and that the personnel in DFO in charge of this exercise were totally uncaring as to who were the winners and who were the losers. It actually utilized this process to predetermine to some degree who the losers would be, but it would all be done under the guise of consultation and it would all be orchestrated in such a way that this initiative would look like it came from the halibut fishermen when in actual fact it was an initiative of personnel in the senior bureaucracy. This is a very interesting document. It is only about 50 pages long.
Some of the things that are in it are indeed things of which I do not think any federal department could possibly be proud. It is my estimate that the taxpayers of Canada will be responsible for, if not hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars in damages to these aggrieved licence holders that were shut out.
I will quote a few things from page 37 of the document. For example, the judge finds that the implementation of this process was an authorized decision of the administration of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Then on page 39 the same judge determines that he will consider the decision to be that of the minister. Then on page 43 he concludes that the plaintiffs were entitled to procedural fairness and on the following page determines-