We took 5,000 so-called fishermen off the lake. In 1969, fishermen had a quota to fish. If you didn't have a quota before that, you didn't fish on Lake Winnipeg. I was in Newfoundland, speaking on a radio show there, and I said to them, “You have a pond. We have a pond. The only difference from your pond is that ours is a little smaller.”
You have to regulate what you are fishing. They've done it all over the world. By doing it here, it might be small.... I am not here to decide about fishing quotas, but the reason for putting a quota entitlement in was to give the fishing industry what we have right now. That is why we have fish in Lake Winnipeg.
I think it's the same old story. It doesn't matter. In Lake Manitoba and Lake Winnipegosis, I can't speak for them, but they have a problem. It is not the fishermen there. That is not their problem. That's not being overfished. That has to go back to science and go into the rest of it. Lake Winnipeg was.... Now you put the fishermen back on the lake. Maybe the quotas are too small. I am not here on that, as I said before, but the abundance is there.
Isn't this fantastic, gentlemen? You came from the west coast and you came from the east coast. You flew across this great nation and you came to a place called Gimli, where they're talking about having too many fish in the lake. You came from a place in Vancouver where they have no salmon. They have nothing left. If you go to Newfoundland, they can't find cod. But here we want to raise the quotas. Is there something being done right here? Is that hard to answer? There must be something right.
Maybe we should be taking more, but managing the resource is no different from the geese. We quit shooting geese and what do we have? We have geese in our bathtub in the back of the yard because we quit shooting them. Is it that hard to figure out why? Isn't it something to go back from here and say, “We were at a lake where they have all kinds of fish. What are they doing wrong?”