Mr. Cuzner, it's the wild west out there.
DFO gave a briefing to this committee, I think in January, as a follow-up note to a presentation they made in December. They clearly indicated—I'm not going to look for it now, but it's in my documents here—that once Larocque came out, they had stopped doing what the court said they did not have the authority to do.
But they continued to do it. In the case of sablefish, they went and funded a survey with $1 million on September 1 of last year.
They deny that this is in contravention of the court ruling. We have a letter in to the minister. I have waited two and a half months for a response, and I haven't even had an acknowledgement that the letter is in.
We do not want to sue the federal government. That is not my business. What we want to do is say, “You cannot be in breach of a court order; you cannot potentially be in violation of the Financial Administration Act.” And to the department we want to say, “You cannot mislead a parliamentary committee by saying things that aren't true.”
I'm not looking for money. Maybe I will be tomorrow, but today I'm just looking for the department to recognize that they got caught without the options on the table, and they need to have this responded to by policy. In the interim, because there's a lack of policy, all of the fisheries all over Canada are seeing uncertainty about where the science funding is coming from. That is going to jeopardize those fisheries.