Mr. Speaker, this is a bill that is worthy of support, certainly, but there are some questions that were raised at committee.
I want to raise one point that he raised during his speech, that currently ships need to voluntarily request a licence to be able to come to Canadian port. With the bill, we could react to a flag state making that same request of a ship that is possibly carrying illegally fished product.
I would like to ask the parliamentary secretary how often a flag state actually asks Canada to inspect one of its ships? It strikes me from the reports that were brought to committee that this never happens, or if it does it is extremely infrequent. What would the bill actually do regarding bringing ships to our ports for inspections?