I'll make a few comments and see if Mr. Yang wishes to add to them.
First of all, there's no treaty funding for enforcement. It's a blank. It's a gap in the treaty. Tla'amin is consistently rejected for guardian funding. We apply under the guardian program and we don't get it, so Tla'amin has to take money that could be used for urgent housing, education, health, and social needs and hire its own guardians with money it doesn't have. That's problem number one.
Problem number two is there are many fine folks at DFO, but as an entity, I'm sorry to say, it's trapped in the colonial history. It's racist, it's arrogant, it's defensive. It does not work with first nations. It's anti-reconciliation. I can give you many examples of that. DFO consistently breaks the law. They do not follow the treaty; they do not follow the basic law set out by the Supreme Court of Canada to put conservation first, followed by aboriginal and treaty rights. They think it's their job to provide opportunities for sport and commercial fisheries, and the resources be damned.
I'll give just one quick example. The name for the Tla'amin village is Teeshosum. That means “waters that are milky white from herring spawn”. That is because, for thousands of years, Tla'amin managed that herring fishery and kept it sustainable to feed their people. DFO came into the picture and wiped out that stock because they, in their arrogance, decided that it was part of an aggregate stock, not a local stock, and that they could authorize commercial harvests on it. Tla'amin stopped fishing, but the stock is gone. That's part of the many issues with DFO.
Going back to the enforcement aspect, what I see is that DFO, as a culture and as an entity, thinks that they can do it better and they don't want anyone else to do it.
I'll ask Mr. Yang if he has comments.