No, the politicians make the lines in the ocean. They draw these lines and say here will be the regulation over on this side of the line and here is another regulation over on this side of the line. It is as if there are police officers at the bottom of the ocean who come up with stop signs and the fish are actually stopping somewhere in mid-ocean and turn around.
Therefore I can understand what the hon. member is talking about when he talks about the ecosystem that should apply to the fishery as it is not presently applying. Let me elaborate on the ecosystem and what is considered under these amendments.
If we look at the respect governments in Canada have for the ecosystem and the effects that government action has on the ecosystem we see today that while our fishermen sit at home, just outside the 200 mile zone, on what we call the Flemish Cap, which the hon. member for Gaspé is very familiar with, we have the foreign nations that continue to fish every single resource there.
I can understand the hon. member's point when he says there should be more consultation than there presently is. The only problem, something we have to think about as parliamentarians, is that when one gives the authority to the local area to have an input sometimes what comes out the other end is not desirable. There has been case after case of that.
In other words, when we tell the province of Quebec it can manage a certain part of the fishing resource, as the federal government has done, which has not been so for the other provinces although they have moved over the past 20 years historically, and then we tell Nova Scotia, P.E.I. and Newfoundland the same thing, what we have is a hodge-podge of regulations. We have a non-respect for the very thing the hon. member is promoting, the ecosystem.