Mr. Chair, I don't agree with Mr. Hardie's statement that we could cover this with the supplementary estimates meeting. This is going to take more than one two-hour meeting, I believe. There's so much involved here, with the restoration resource unit, the salmon enhancement program, and the Coast Guard dive teams.
We saw the instance on the west coast of B.C., I believe it was in 2001 or 2002, where a fishing vessel capsized at the mouth of the Fraser River. Coast Guard divers had to wait 45 minutes for approval. They were on site, but they had to wait for 45 minutes for approval to go into the water. The people on that boat drowned. There's a high probability that they were still in an air space and could have been rescued had the dive team been able to go in sooner. This is cutting that dive team. This is going to cause life-threatening situations where the divers will not be able to enter the water without their approval.
I also want to stress that's not the only important part of this request for this meeting. I took part in a resource restoration program last fall, just before we came back from our summer time in our constituencies. We had two DFO officers guide 30 volunteers, restoring a river channel that had flattened out on a delta so thin that the water was only two inches deep and the massive chinook salmon could not get back up. We spent part of a morning and an afternoon with burlap and fence pegs restoring that river to a channel that became over a foot deep. Those fish would otherwise have been stranded in the lake and unable to reproduce, further impacting our salmon populations on the west coast.
That was just one simple operation for a day or two with those two DFO officers. The cuts that are being made here are absolutely unconscionable. We've heard that our Conservative government made cuts to DFO over and over again. This is unbelievable. We've heard from constituents, from conservation organizations, from schoolteachers who have had salmon tanks in their classrooms for decades, who are absolutely outraged by what is being done with these cuts. To try to fit them into one meeting with the supplementary estimates would be doing an injustice to what's being done here.