Thank you, Ms. Jordan, for the question.
I share your view. I have had, as a member of Parliament from New Brunswick, a chance to work directly with some of the local and regional officials of our department in various branches of Fisheries and Oceans, which is a highly decentralized department.
We now have the Canadian Coast Guard as partners in our department, a remarkable group of women and men, as well. To the person, the people that I've had the privilege of working with, as a member of Parliament, or certainly in the few months I've been the minister, are an outstanding group of Canadians. They care deeply about the environment. They care deeply about the protection of our oceans. They're inspired by the hard work of women and men who earn their living on the seas or lakes. Many of them volunteer with community groups and go to meetings in the evenings because they want to be actively involved in their communities and because they live in many of these communities that are directly affected by the decisions that they participate in taking.
I share your view that perhaps they have not felt as supported, as valued, as they should have been and as they are by Canadians. Some of it has been the financial constraints that the department has lived under. We're trying to remedy that. There's often never enough money to do all of the good things we want to do, but the deputy and I, along with the commissioner of the Coast Guard and the senior management of the department, have been working with the Treasury Board and ultimately the Department of Finance. I'm told that I'll have a chance to meet with some of the Treasury Board people in the coming months and hopefully resolve what we've been calling an integrity gap in the sense that we have more and more programs that Canadians expect the department to deliver on and, in some cases, we don't have the adequate resources to properly deliver those programs.
Ships are breaking down in the Coast Guard because we're not doing the maintenance because we have to use that money for operational purposes. That's not the way to run a multi-billion dollar institution, and that's not the way to best serve Canadians who care deeply about the work that the department should and can be doing. We hope to get to a better place.
But the mistakes, Ms. Jordan, will be mine, and the hard work and the insight that comes from the department will be from the remarkable group of almost 10,500 women and men who work in the department.