Fisheries committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to thank you for the opportunity to be here and for the committee's ongoing interest in overfishing. As you mentioned, I am accompanied by two officials here from the departments as representatives. David Bevan is assistant deputy minister of fisheri

Fisheries committee  My reference to irritants wasn't necessarily to building relationships. One of the goals was to work with irritants between different countries. Resolving irritants has strengthened relations, no doubt. Both of them mesh there. I'll throw out an example of an irritant. The Machi

Fisheries committee  I certainly will address that, but my reference to irritants was in bilateral irritants that are occurring with countries. I have to work with these to get a resolution to those irritants—

Fisheries committee  Overall, if we look at NAFO, for example, and if you wanted me to elaborate on how we might deal with that, one of the areas in advancing governance in the NAFO area was last September agreeing to changes in enforcement and management, which came into effect on January 1, and als

Fisheries committee  I'd like to indicate that in the past I have never personally rendered an opinion on custodial management overall, but overall, I feel the situation that's important is that we have to manage fisheries in our FMOs, which are in areas on the high seas that all countries have a rig

Fisheries committee  First of all, I think we have to look at two periods, prior to September NAFO and post-September NAFO. During this period last year, for example, there were 28 on-board inspections and seven violations. This year, with 30 since September, there have been no violations or no citat

Fisheries committee  They're in play. Enforcement measures would be if there's a violation, a serious violation, some repeat offenders, fishing for directed species in these areas, you would have to go and report.

Fisheries committee  A just penalty would be a penalty that's going to be a very, very significant deterrent to fishing in that area.

Fisheries committee  It would inflict such hardship on them that it would discourage that fishing in the future.

Fisheries committee  That would be a just penalty in my estimation.

Fisheries committee  Overall, each country has its own system of jurisprudence. If a case is brought before any particular country, we can set legislation in our country, and our courts could render penalties in line with what we do.

Fisheries committee  We would like to see a common system of penalties and punishment doled out to whichever contracting party in NAFO was there, regardless of where, but we don't have jurisdiction over the court system in other countries. We just don't have that. That's fundamental. I mean UNCLOS—

Fisheries committee  They haven't. That's why it's so important that we keep working on it.

Fisheries committee  I think we need to get those countries—And that's what I mean. I mean building cooperation, building this to encourage those countries to adopt the same levels of punishment or to give it a higher priority when in their states, when in their jurisdictions.

Fisheries committee  I'm never happy with anything until I see the final result.