Mr. Speaker, as I said in my speech, the U.S. is in its ratification process right now. Certainly, we would expect all major fishing states to sign on to this agreement at some point. This prevents egregious international overharvesting and illegal fishing.
One only has to look at a couple of examples. The Chilean sea bass is a very high value, very tasty and very high-end, white tablecloth restaurant sea food that has been overfished in international waters by a number of countries and pirates around the world. There has been no international measure in place to deal with that. This would allow the capacity for individual countries to deal with problems like that.
Another great example, which the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans mentioned, is the international tuna agreement. We often catch tuna on the east coast of Canada that has been tagged in Portugal, or off the coast of Spain or North Africa.
We have an international fishery and many species here and this is one way of addressing some of the problems with that international catch.