Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you, honourable member. I don't know if we would say they paid directly, but certainly in any international negotiation there is discussion around the table in terms of sharing arrangements, what the level of the total allowable catch will be set at, and so forth, and during the most difficult years of NAFO certainly there were compromises at certain times.

Foreign Affairs committee  He said that Mr. Hearn merely said that these were improvements to the situation. Mr. Hearn went far beyond that. Mr. Hearn said that with these results Canada was now the custodian of the resources beyond 200 miles, and Mr. Hearn was responsible for the statement in the 2008 election platform that said they'd assumed custodial management beyond 200 miles.

Foreign Affairs committee  Was that a question?

Foreign Affairs committee  I think the facts speak for themselves. They support the conclusion. Mr. Hearn had spoken publicly on numerous occasions about what his objective was in pursuing these negotiations. That's not speculation; that's fact.

Foreign Affairs committee  We just agreed that I would take the first question and Mr. Applebaum would take the second.

Foreign Affairs committee  Madame Deschamps, you asked what went wrong with the negotiations. You talked about the government's promoting custodial management. The bottom line is that they did commit to implementing custodial management; in fact, they committed to more than that. They committed to extending fisheries jurisdiction not only to the edge of the Grand Banks, which covers the straddling stocks, but also to the edge of the Flemish Cap, which includes discrete stocks beyond the Canadian 200-mile zone.

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As you said, my name is Scott Parsons. I worked for 34 years with the Government of Canada, most of it with the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans in various capacities. For the last 18 years of my career, I was an assistant deputy minister in the department, responsible at various times for fisheries management science and for oceans, including the development and passage of the Oceans Act of 1997, which embodied the concepts of ecosystem management and precautionary approach that the previous speaker alluded to this morning.