Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise to speak to the bill and to the issues raised by the hon. member who just spoke. He was talking about the supposed benefits of the ACOA program, more government subsidies and so on.
I should like to tell the hon. member what I discovered in my recent trip to the Atlantic provinces and what some of the fishermen are saying. I do not claim it was an exhaustive trip, but I did find interesting some of the things they mentioned about the efforts that should be made by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to decentralize and to provide a better service to fishermen.
When I was in Antigonish they told me that a few short years ago they had two employees of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans who took the time to deliver tags for their lobster traps right to their boats. Now there are 37 employees working out of some office and the fishermen have to go to Halifax to get their tags. This is not a streamlining of services. This is not a slimmed down bureaucracy. If the minister were keen on providing a better service at a better price and more cost efficiently, there would be widespread support.
The reason there is so much cynicism about the bill as one step of many similar steps is that the bureaucracy continues to increase and service continues to go down. Fishermen on the west coast and on the east coast are having difficulty finding a DFO person on the enforcement side in the field. Yet there are many people who seem to be stuck in an office and not providing services.
User fees will be allowed under the bill. The fishermen are saying that they do not mind paying user fees for the government services they use. However the government, not just in this department but in other departments too, continues to expand the requirements placed on the backs of fishermen, farmers and business people. The government continues to expand and charge the people. In other words it becomes a user pay bureaucracy.
The businesses have no say in what services are provided. The government continues to throw more people and more money at a problem and then doubles the fees. It is not a user fee for a finite service. It is just: "Let us tax these poor guys, call it a user fee or a licence fee, jack them up and see if they go out of business".
If the government were sincere about helping out Atlantic Canadians and British Columbia fishermen with the Fisheries Act there are a couple of things it could do. It could provide services in the field.
I have an article from the Vancouver Sun about the DFO. It states that John Fraser's report on the Fraser River sockeye indicated that the DFO nearly destroyed the salmon fishery in British Columbia last year through mismanagement and a shocking lack of enforcement.
If the government wants to re-establish some credibility with west coast fishermen at all levels, whether sports, aboriginal or commercial fishermen, it would have some enforcement people in the field to make sure the rules are enforced. It has no credibility on the west coast.
On the east coast it is a similar problem. Through successive years of federal government mismanagement it has managed to pretty well destroy certain parts of that valuable fishery. The people on the east coast do not run around saying: "Thank you, Mr. Tobin, for the turbot", even though we are all glad that the pillaging of that resource is not going on any longer.
What they are really saying is thanks to the federal government for destroying what used to be one of the backbones of the Canadian economy and still is, through no help from the federal government, an important part of a maritimer's life.
If the government wanted to help it could get off the backs and out of the pockets of fishermen and let them get on with life. It is not only fishermen when we talk about ACOA grants. I heard a member from the maritimes make a statement the other day: "Thank goodness for regional development grants. They are the way to prosperity. We will get more regional grants".
If that were the case the maritime provinces would be the most prosperous provinces in the world. The trouble is the government has not yet caught on to the basic economic fact of what is best to promote business, to promote diversity and to promote fellows like the hon. member was mentioning who want to export around the world. We should say to that person: "Listen, I will offer you low tax rates because I am not wasting your money. I will offer you less government regulations so that you can have a chance to put a business together easily. I will make sure that the Department of the Environment does not take three years to do a study when you want to start a mine and that there will be rapid approval processes".
Why not co-ordinate with the provincial governments so it is not overlapped and driven from Ottawa instead of being driven from the provinces where it should be? Then perhaps those people would have a chance to diversify, to get out in the world and do what they want to do? They used to be able to do it before the federal government stepped in and started kicking butt. If it would allow people in the maritime provinces to exert their free enterprise spirit, to go back to the roots that made them strong and the most vibrant part of Canada at that time, we would see a prosperous maritimes.
If we continue with expanding ACOA, giving more grants and having a bureaucracy in the DFO that will not even deliver the tags but will sit back and ask for more user fees, it is hopeless. The government seems to have lost its sense of direction.