Madam Speaker, the communal right is seen as a collective right. I am sure the hon. member is very much aware of what that means.
How we define a moderate livelihood, as described by the courts, is something that we have to sit around the table on. We have to work with the aboriginal community and with all the parties together. We must ask how we can ensure that the aboriginal people who are the beneficiaries of this treaty right are going to exercise it. We need to define those terms, but we need to define them in conjunction with the aboriginal people, by sitting around the table and talking with them.
If we were to ask everybody in this room how to define that we would have 30 different definitions. It is something that has to be negotiated. We have to sit at the table and do it.
I have always felt that it is better to negotiate than to go to the courts, but there are others out there who refuse to move forward. Even when we introduced the aboriginal fishing strategy after Sparrow many said that we could not move forward. The last Conservative government was not any better at predicting what the supreme court was going to do with respect to Sparrow. However, we were trying to bring the aboriginal community into the fishery. Buying up licences was one way we were doing it. We have already tried to work things out through negotiation.
We have to negotiate. At the end of the day, if we cannot find some sort of mediation, we will have to go back to the courts. However, when we go to the courts we have to go by what they put forward and we have to live with their views.
One of the challenges we have is to define a moderate livelihood. It is something we will have to sit around the table to deal with. That is why we need to focus on the long term and not on the short term issues that distract us. The courts have recognized it as a treaty right and we have to ensure that we work together so they can exercise that right by taking due consideration of the interests and being sensitive to the other interests in the fisheries.