Fisheries committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members. I wish you all a very early Christmas. Take care of yourselves and be healthy.

Fisheries committee  I hope I have a few seconds to respond to that. I hope you and your committee members have the opportunity to reflect on that word “partnership”. I can go into great detail about how that fishery was established. It was from, I can assure you, the commercial sector. I'd like to

Fisheries committee  What I see is that we need that panel or a mechanism. We need to put the Clearwater sale on hold. Personally, I would like to have the opportunity to talk about that offshore decision in the Hague. It was established by witnesses and testimony from Southwest Nova. There was a

Fisheries committee  I've had access to lawyers and counsel over the 21 years here concerning adjacency, and it clearly defines that. I can't get back into the mindset of the Supreme Court judges on Donald Marshall, but I can get into the mindset of the Supreme Court when they talked about adjacency.

Fisheries committee  I'm not talking about Donald Marshall. I'm talking about a Supreme Court decision that talked about—

Fisheries committee  —the right for the Mi'kmaq to have access to a fishery. That statement is very clear. It talks about the territories of the bands. We have 13 in Nova Scotia. If we respect that decision, 13 bands with adjacency, we would have this solved by 90% tonight, sir.

Fisheries committee  I can reconcile it by what I say: that the wording is very clear. It's adjacency. If you live by the decision of the Supreme Court in 1999, it talks about it very clearly. It is also in a clarification of the standing committee. Twenty-one years ago, the same committee that you

Fisheries committee  Well, I was a lobsterman for 38 years.

Fisheries committee  Yes. For full disclosure, I was a municipal warden for seven...nine years at the municipal level. I spent 11 years at the House of Assembly as an MLA. I can tell you right now that I have no affiliation with any political party, and I am in retirement mode.

Fisheries committee  I agree with part of it, Mr. Williamson. I think you're getting right to it here. What frustrates me the most is that this here is a discussion or disagreement over a court decision. If you go back to 1999, they talked about adjacency and issues like that; to me, it's clear. Wh

Fisheries committee  It matters if you.... I hope that your members have a map there. If you don't, I hope you take notes. If you look at the Sipekne’katik band, you see that Mr. Sack's band is basically northeast of Halifax and between Halifax and Millbrook, while if you look at Bear River and Acadi

Fisheries committee  That's my interpretation. That's my perspective on the decision, yes. I'm not that far from all other commercial stakeholders in this area.

Fisheries committee  Thank you very much, Madam Gill, for your question. You're getting right to the core of the issue. Certainly I believe the mechanism is our hope, our early Christmas present, if, hopefully, a recommendation will come from the standing committee to the minister to create such a

Fisheries committee  Okay, I'll keep it short. First of all, in the first five years of the Marshall decision, the federal government spent over $600 million acquiring licences and purchasing licences from retirees. Just this last summer they gave out to the native bands in New Brunswick and Nova Sc

Fisheries committee  I appreciate the question. The chaos is what I'm referring to. If you look over the last two months, you'll see the chaos I'm referring to is that the commercial sector is feeling that it has been abandoned by the present system. I can go into great lengths here, but I'll refer