Okay, thank you.
You talked about a cooperative solution to get this thing done. It's quite simple: the minister has to go to the Treasury Board or to the finance minister and ask for the money to do the job that they're legally responsible to do. It's not that difficult. He just goes over, knocks on his door, and says, “I need money to do science, to do the surveys, to get this product out of the water and into the markets so we can have an economic livelihood for all three coasts and our inshore fisheries.” It's not that hard.
There has to be a reason he's not successful in doing that. Maybe it's because old habits die hard, if it's easy to get fishermen to volunteer and spend their money to do something that DFO is supposed to do, or still, post-Larocque, continue on with these habits because they're thinking nobody will get caught. It shows you that this department, in my view—and I've asked year after year for an inquiry into the practices and the policies of this department—has taken a terrific resource on both coasts and completely destroyed it.
In 1992, if you look at the cod fishery, there was a $4-billion readjustment for that fishery in Canada, and not one person in DFO was ever held responsible. Not one. It's like telling foresters they have to cut a bunch of trees and use those trees to pay for the forestry research, or telling other people in other industries—or telling MPs—you come to work for three weeks, you don't get paid, you volunteer your time. I wonder how we'd like it after that.
Isn't the solution quite simple? Isn't it that the minister needs to go back to the Treasury Board and to the finance minister and insist and demand that the money be there to pay for the science that needs to be done in order to assist your industries?
It's not that difficult. When I hear of the situation, “Well, we can't get the money right now, but we have a way of working with you—”. I think, Greg, you said that, that they want to work in some sort of manner with you, and you're asking, “What does that mean?” They'll get back to you. That's like a wink-wink, nudge-nudge, don't you think?