Mr. Speaker, on May 1, I rose in the House to pose a question to the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, asking him to extend the May 24 deadline and to commit to begin serious discussions with representatives of the affected communities who had already chosen the people to negotiate on their behalf and had sent a group to Ottawa.
This group had some difficulty in having complete meetings with the minister. He responded in a manner that left the May 24 deadline still in place. He did say, however, that he would be going to the west coast the next day to meet with groups there.
I was concerned, as were others, that the minister would avoid meeting the group that had been sent here by the communities at great expense. Instead of meeting with them, he opted to go to the west coast while they were still here in Ottawa seeking meetings with him.
The next day the minister did met with a few groups that told him he was doing a good job. At the strong insistence of the fishermen's union, which still had representatives on the west coast, he did meet with some of them. A day later he spent 45 minutes with the Pacific Salmon Alliance, which is the group that was in Ottawa and had gone back in an attempt to have a meeting with him. The community representatives that had been in Ottawa did get to meet with him for a mere 45 minutes.
I find it amazing that among Liberal ministers they can spend half a day flying halfway across the country to get away from a group of legitimate representatives, in this case representing fishing communities, commercial, aboriginal and sports fisher people, environmentalists like the Suzuki group, the Georgia Strait group, and the Save Our Wild Salmon group. Instead of having serious meetings with them here in Ottawa to negotiate a workable plan, the minister chose to go off to the west coast and grandstand there rather than actually getting down to business.
Since that time as well we know some licences have changed hands. The last report I have is that there are about 400 which have changed hands under the aegis of the new program. I am told that some owners have purchased up to 11 different licences. The cost of these would amount to many hundreds of thousands of dollars.
This means we are leaning toward a new high investment type of fishery, probably an urban based and not a community based fishery. We have not really addressed with this policy the questions of commitment to the resource. An urban based fishery which has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in licences alone is to care more about recovering its hundreds of thousands of dollars for an annual licence than it is to looking after future stocks.
A community based fishery based on families doing the fishing from communities will make certain the fishery has a much longer life.
If the minister is truly honest in his promise he made in the House when he responded to my first question to bridge some of the gaps, address uncertainties and fine tune the program, he would suspend the May 24 deadline, which I asked him to do, so true and meaningful discussions can take place with no guns held to the heads of the communities involved in the form of this deadline.
Tomorrow Peter Pearse and Don Cruikshank will be in Ottawa in front of the committee, experts the minister could well afford to heed. I hope he will would drop the deadline and work out a policy that will leave the west coast with communities as well as with salmon enhancement capabilities. People, after all, are a necessary and important part of the west coast environment as well.