Colin Sproul, who speaks for the Unified Fisheries Conservation Alliance, which represents about a dozen fishing organizations and almost 5,000 harvesters in the Maritimes, wrote that the Unified Fisheries Conservation Alliance is not being consulted by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in any meaningful way in any hopes of improving fishery enforcement on the Bay of Fundy. He said they continue to be ignored while their fisheries and communities descend into chaos and that any statements otherwise are misleading and dismissive of the crisis that continues to widen across the Maritimes. He said they are ready and willing to sit down at any table to collaborate on fishing conservation.
These are important statements by the most important fishing associations in the Maritimes, which totally contradict the minister's assertion before this committee that she was consulting with these associations and talked to these associations this summer. Most of these associations—all of them, in fact—have said they have never talked to her on any issue, let alone on conservation.
For the minister to sit here and tell members of Parliament in a parliamentary committee that she started on the enforcement issue and consulted with associations is a fabrication. It's unconscionable and it's a breach of the privilege of members of Parliament.
Can we have a Minister of Fisheries come here and acknowledge the fact that they have not done their job? The fact is that the minister has never come to southwest Nova Scotia and met with any fishing groups. She has never even picked up the phone and called any southwestern Nova Scotia fishing groups on the issue of enforcement or any other issue. However, when pressed here, she said she started by consulting with the fishing associations. That's clearly not true.
In fact, on a number of occasions, these groups, in particular the Unified Fisheries Conservation Alliance, asked this summer for meetings with the minister and the minister's office. Guess how many meetings happened. There were none. The minister has the gall to sit here in committee in the middle of a fishing crisis that's built up over six Liberal fisheries ministers, particularly numbers four, five and six, who ignored everything and all the poaching that is and has been going on in the lobster fishery.
Lobster fishery reports in the first two weeks of the season in southwest Nova Scotia show that catches are down over 30% over last year's December catch, which was a terrible year. After seven to eight years of illegal poaching in the birthplace of lobster, St. Marys Bay, where lobsters from New England and all over Nova Scotia go to breed and are fished in the summer with 10,000 traps, there is zero enforcement. By the minister's own numbers, out of 10,000 traps, they seized 239 this past summer. That is not enforcement; that's a joke, and they're destroying livelihoods.
Could there be some connection? Do you know? I don't know if members on this committee realize that it takes seven years for lobster to grow to the minimum size to catch them.
Is it shocking to members that the minister doesn't seem to care? This minister knows, after seven or eight years of poaching, that we're finding year after year in southwest Nova Scotia that the catch is down, and it's down because we've gone back to pre-1977.
Do you know what happened in 1977? I will give credit to a former minister of fisheries, Roméo LeBlanc, who said this had to stop. We were down to 23,000 metric tons of lobster catching, so they created the lobster fishing areas and said no longer was anyone going to fish year-round because fishing year-round and when lobsters were breeding would destroy the stock. We're not even sure now that dropping from 100,000 metric tons down to 23,000 metric tons is actually going to—