Thank you, Chair.
I'd like to thank everyone for coming again today.
I'd like to talk a little bit about sport fishing, and I'll preface my comments. As I went through the estimates, I used my computer to do that and I'm going to make a brief point. I think my point is going to become fairly clear. In terms of doing a search on the word “aquaculture”, it appears 134 times in the estimates; when we look at the phrase “commercial fishery”, it appears 15 times; when you look at the phrase “recreational fishery”, it appears four times; and when you look for “sport fishing”, it appears once.
If you look on page 34, where sport fishing does appear once, it's under “Sustainable Fisheries and Aquaculture”, and we have quite a bit of detail there saying commercial and recreational fishing are important sources of revenue in parts of Canada, so that's one of the times that recreational fishing appears. The Atlantic fishing industry employs more than 84,000 people. Is that just in the commercial fishery, or is that in recreational fishing? That's where I'm going with this.
What I'm getting at here is we seem to have a lot of numbers talking about how many people are employed, how much value is placed in the commercial fishery, and in aquaculture, yet we talk and the last word in that first paragraph says, “Canadian sport fishing”, which is the only time it appears, “continues to inject billions of dollars into local economies each year”, but we don't seem to have any firm grasp of how many people work in fishing lodges, as fishing guides directly, not to mention the indirect value of all of this.
So when we look on page 36, which is I think what my friend Mr. Lunney was talking about earlier, we have some information there on science and support of sustainable fisheries and aquaculture and we go from $134.3 million to $130.3 million and $128.9 million over the next three years. Of course, the program enablers and human resource FTEs go down correspondingly. If that's the part in the budget that looks into the science and everything behind the sport fishing industry or any science that's done on behalf of the sport fishing industry or any FTEs that are being spent on behalf of the sport fishing and recreational fishing industry, I would like some clarification on that, because it's not taken out of there. I'm hopeful there's a lot more being done than what appears in the estimates. So could I get some clarification on that, please?