Fisheries committee  I think our point is that the Government of Canada has more than conservation objectives for its fisheries. Fisheries are a resource. They are adjacent to communities that have the capacity to harvest them for broad social and economic benefits to those communities, and they need

Fisheries committee  They could work, and we're proposing a way to make them work. We think they could work by bringing these principles into the regulations and making them conditions of licence, because then they become legally binding. Presently they aren't. People can look the other way, and it l

Fisheries committee  I have to be Solomon.

Fisheries committee  We would take a sustainable development and a holistic approach, so we would say that you have to protect the social and economic development and coastal communities by also protecting the environment on which their economy rests.

Fisheries committee  Thank you, Mr. Finnigan. That is a very good question. The fisheries are going well right now in the Atlantic provinces. This is especially true because of shellfish, lobster in particular. Lobster landings have doubled in the past 10 years and the price has risen. This is good

Fisheries committee  That is the target. Agreements are used to take control of licenses that are supposed to be for individuals who are supposed to have full control. Secret agreements are used to reap the benefits of the licenses. This is happening in southwestern Nova Scotia, in southwestern New B

Fisheries committee  The situation is not the same everywhere, though. In your riding, there are people and investors who buy lobster licenses. This is not as serious as in the other speaker's area and elsewhere, but it is happening in your riding also. This problem must be checked before it spreads

Fisheries committee  I can say, Mr. Morrissey, that our members have not raised issues with us around things that they would like to keep from the changes. We have a lot of concerns about things that were done and are very problematic. On the pesticides issue in agriculture—

Fisheries committee  One of the things people haven't talked about is that the DFO labs that did the toxicology research were closed down. You can't do the research for that. We asked, through our partnerships with universities, to be able to rent the labs so we could do the research. We were refused

Fisheries committee  That's the basis of our whole point. We believe our Fisheries Act and the Government of Canada in its approach to fisheries should consider this as a resource, and that's what the courts have said. The government and the minister have to see fisheries as a resource that the gover

Fisheries committee  Absolutely.

Fisheries committee  We've been working on this for 20 years. We had these really good policies saying that the fishing licences go to the individuals and that the individuals have to fish them themselves and live in coastal communities. We need that for the social and economic development of our coa

Fisheries committee  It's a big contraption where you put something in and it moves all these gears and maybe after a little while you get a result. They've designed a Rube Goldberg machine for PIIFCAF, and it doesn't work. They announced new measures in September.

Fisheries committee  No, it was this year, and it was based on recommendations we made two years ago to the department on tightening up the vacation provisions and the in-season stacking of licences. Within hours of the department's having announced it was going to tighten up on that, the violators o

Fisheries committee  We want to see it in the act. We want to see it in the fisheries regulations. We saw it in the conditions of licence. If you bring it into the conditions of licence and you violate those conditions of licence, you have committed a criminal offence.