Mr. Speaker, first I would like to thank the hon. member for Bonaventure—Gaspé—Îles-de-la-Madeleine—Pabok for his helpful contribution to the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans.
At the time, I was the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans. The hon. member is an intelligent man and an unfailingly co-operative committee member.
To return to the subject specifically, the kernel of our discussion is of course the 1982 United Nations convention on the law of the sea.
It is worthwhile reminding the House that Canada, with Singapore and Venezuela, in effect was the conscience of this great international law making project. It lasted for 12 years. Alan Beesley who was legal adviser to our foreign ministry, Tommy Koh of Singapore, and Aguilar Mawdsley who later became a judge at the World Court, provided the modernizing ideas on the law of the sea. It is a great credit to their initiatives that this became a convention after 12 long years of negotiation.
We still have not ratified the convention which recently became law with the 60th instrument of ratification and there were reasons for that. It was thought that there were gaps in the treaty which became apparent in the light of subsequent developments.
Those hon. members who were in the previous parliament will remember the problems the minister of fisheries of that period had with flagrant overfishing as we saw it by certain long range European fishing countries just outside Canadian territorial waters. This overfishing contributed to the degradation and ultimately the threat of disappearance of scarce fisheries stocks.
The minister, on excellent and imaginative advice, decided to go ahead anyway. He was right that there was a legal base for the control action we took. It was necessary to go back to the 1958 and 1960 conventions, the first and second United Nations conventions, to get the main philosophical support for what we did.
It will be remembered that Canada was taken to the World Court over this by Spain. In a ruling in December, the World Court upheld Canada's position but on a technical adjectival law issue, not the main substantive issue, of the ability to conserve endangered or diminishing stocks.
In the meantime, to make assurance doubly sure we went ahead with negotiation of supplementary international agreements that would fill the gaps as they had now become apparent in the 1982 convention. These were the 1994 and 1995 UN agreements on straddling and highly migratory fish stocks which are the substance of the United Nations agreements on straddling and highly migratory fish stocks, UNFA as it is referred to. For these treaties to be able to go ahead, in our view we need to supplement what the then minister of fisheries did by divine inspiration and the power of the apple. This is not an instrument of discord, an apple of discord. It is a friendly object in international negotiations.
The minister went ahead and took the action but it would be very important to cross all the t's and dot all the i's and make sure that Canadian internal legislation provides the enforcement powers for the purposes of Canadian internal law that the minister found, correctly, in international law as it then existed before 1982 and as imaginatively reinterpreted to meet new conditions.
That essentially is what this bill is all about. It will tidy up our national law. It will then put us in a position to do what I have asked for at least five or six times in the House over the last several years, to go ahead and finally ratify the 1982 convention on the law of the sea.
This is a convention that Canadians inspired, in very large measure. We gave it the interesting dynamic elements. We did not have the problems that our American friends had. They worried about damage to their internal mining and other interests by the convention's very imaginative provisions on sharing some of the to be expected wealth from ocean depth mining with underdeveloped countries and others under a special United Nations fund and a special United Nations administration. We did not have these fears.
We did have this feeling and commitment to environmental protection, the special concern that Canadians have had for protecting endangered species and species in danger of extinction as we have seen both on the east coast and the west coast. On the east coast it is Europeans and on the west coast we feel it is sometimes internal states within the American system that do not respect the United States treaty obligations under international law and on the west coast, the 1985 Canada-U.S. Pacific salmon treaty.
This is a measure to tidy up our law. It will remove the objections that some have made to our ratifying the 1982 convention. Immediately after the adoption of this law, it will enable us to do everything to present a 200% perfect legal case on which the then minister of fisheries in 1994-95, with great imagination and that special gift of poetry that Newfoundlanders and I suppose people from all of Canada's maritime regions have, decided to go ahead. He cited the duty of protecting endangered species, the notion that it is one world of scarce resources. One country diminished by unnecessary illegal acts in terms of general international law damages all the world community.
It is a very constructive piece of legislation. We welcome the contributions that have been made from all parts of the House in support of the measures conveyed in this. It is my great pleasure to endorse the legislation, to urge its support and to thank members from all parties in the fisheries committee and in other arenas for the support they have given these general principles.
We are a law-abiding country. We support international law, not international law narrowly construed, but international law captured in its full spirit and with an eye to emerging needs. It is not simply a static re-statement of the old in relation to old problems. It is capturing the new problems and finding creative solutions for them.
I am assured by the former minister of fisheries and the fisheries minister that this will enable us to proceed to ratification of the 1982 convention.