Mr. Hardie, you're absolutely right. I've heard some of those same desires on my travels across the country, including in your province. The recreational fisheries sector in your province is well organized, well structured, and has a long-standing tradition of partnership with our department. The commercial fishery is the same, as are indigenous groups.
These are the people whose livelihoods and whose passion depends on the success and the health of these fish stocks. They have a very real, personal interest in getting it right. They also have, in the case of long-time commercial fishers or sports fishers or certainly indigenous groups, a vast body of knowledge of what works, what doesn't work, where has it been successful in the past, and where perhaps improvements could have been made.
We welcome any chance to partner with these groups. If we're going to get it right, it's because these groups believe that we found the right balance and the best way to ensure the best possible protection.
Laws and the respect of laws often depend on the confidence people have in those laws. One of the things I should share with your committee, Mr. Chair, is that the successive budget cuts at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans over a number of years have put us in the position—and I'm seeking to rectify this with my colleagues at the Treasury Board and the Minister of Finance—where even if we had a better, more robust legislative framework, as I hope we get to, we would need increased resources around habitat protection, monitoring, and enforcement.
I talked about that in June when Mr. Garneau and I had a brief announcement about how we were hoping to proceed. However, I'm also conscious that the legislative text is one thing, but we need both in our department and other government agencies. Who better to partner with us than the people whose livelihoods depend on these resources? We would have a much higher degree of integration and collaboration and, frankly, boots on the ground in many cases to do the monitoring, to do the enforcement.
You can have the best laws on the books, but if nobody ever gets charged because you don't have the ability to investigate and prosecute offences, the laws are illusory, and people are left with a false sense that you've done something. That's certainly not what we're intending to do.