Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Madam Minister, for being here this morning.
Madam Minister, since 2015, as you know I have worked almost daily with colleagues and stakeholders to advance the government's Great Lakes agenda. You've been a part of that dialogue, your staff has, and I want to thank you for that.
To be blunt, our government made several Great Lakes platform promises in both 2015 as well as 2019 that would be quite impactful on the basin, and I am anxious to move these commitments ahead, as you know.
Your department, as I've said earlier, has played and continues to play a big role. I'm pleased to hear in your opening remarks that you are well positioned, Madam Minister, to advance the government's agenda. I would like to drill down on precisely what that means for the Great Lakes and would like to know more about your Great Lakes plan.
The reason I want to get into the weeds on this is that DFO has not always focused on the Great Lakes. In fact, many Great Lakes stakeholders call the Great Lakes Canada's “forgotten coast”. The Great Lakes rarely factor in government strategies on water and fisheries. As just one example, when you appeared at the committee on the topic of your mandate letter, the subject never even came up by you or your staff or members of the committee. Not one of the members from any party asked about your Great Lakes role.
Of course, some of this stems from the fact that despite the Great Lakes being home to an $8-billion fishery—that's a “b”—there is not one MP from Ontario on the committee, which is unfortunate, and hence one of the reasons I am here today.
This missing link means that there are policy and knowledge gaps in what is raised around the table with respect to the Great Lakes. For example, when the blue economy strategy was first devised, it failed to account for anything other than Canada's coastal fisheries, and as I have raised with your department many times, not all fish swim in salt water.
Ignoring the economic output of the Great Lakes is to ignore billions' worth of untapped potential, and I was certainly pleased to see that you've fixed that shortcoming in the most recent incarnation of the strategy. I am hopeful that this awareness is foreshadowing what is to come. We spoke about this on many occasions. Once again, I want to thank you for that.
I say this all as a former mayor who sat, and continues to sit, on the Great Lakes...as an MP and who knows the triple bottom line implications of the Great Lakes, that being the economic, environmental and socio-cultural. Thirty-five hundred species of plants and animals, drinking water for millions, 238,000 jobs and fifty billion dollars' worth of economic output should at the very least warrant serious consideration in this upcoming federal budget. The Great Lakes fishery alone is worth $8 billion—once again with a “b”— annually, yet Canada has for 40 years fallen short on our promises to the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, something that I hope will be fully addressed once again in the upcoming budget.
Minister, with all this as context, I have two simple questions.
First, of the $243.2 million in new authorizations before us today, how much will be specifically allocated to Great Lakes projects and programming, and how will these new resources specifically advance your promise to advance the government's Great Lakes agenda?
Secondly, can you point to the line in the supplementary estimates (C) or in any financial document brought before the committee that specifies the exact amount of our allocation to the Great Lakes Fishery Commission to support that binational organization and the work they do to protect the $8-billion Great Lakes Fishery?