Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the comments of the member opposite. Yes, it would be beneficial if the government could act unilaterally and fix this problem. Unfortunately it cannot. The supreme court has stated what the law of the land is, and the law of the land gives the Mi'kmaq a priority right to commercial fish. The only right the minister has to interfere is the right to interfere in the interest of conservation. That is the only way he can interfere in this matter.
The court looked at the current regulations in place and struck them down. It said that those regulations interfered with the treaty right and therefore they had no place.
What is interesting is that we arrived at this situation not unwittingly. The information that we present to the court enables the court to make decisions. It will make a decision in our favour against it, if we want to look at in those terms, but if we do not give the court the information we are at its mercy. Not only must we give them the information, but we have to be careful if we make any concessions. The government made two critical concessions when it argued this case before the supreme court.
In the first one the crown's expert witness described the prohibition on Mi'kmaq trading with others and the restriction that they only trade at truck houses. The crown's expert witness allowed that that could be interpreted by the courts as somehow a right to trade. It was anything but a right to trade. It was a restriction on a trading right, but the crown allowed that restriction on a trading right could be interpreted as a right to trade.
The second mistake the crown made was that this treaty did not mention fish as a trading item. Fish had no value as a trading item and was readily available to anybody. Yet the crown allowed and the government allowed that fish could be included as a trading commodity. From a restriction on trading, from a treaty in which fish was not mentioned at all, we arrived at a place where preferential right to fish has been given.
We have a very difficult situation. It is easy to criticize the supreme court and I have done it because it deserves to give this situation the sober second thought that it did not get by the government.
There are other issues the government did not mention that are worth mentioning. Since the signing of the Magna Carta in British common law there has existed something called the public right to fish. That public right to fish was in operation at the time this treaty was signed. This treaty ignored that public right. That should have been brought to the attention of the government because there was nothing done when this treaty was signed to revoke the public right. The government should have brought that to the court's attention. It did not and that has been allowed to stand since that time.