Madam Speaker, after listening to the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party introduce this motion in the House and listening to what he said were the disaster points in the Canadian fishing industry, I only wish he had listened to the member for Sackville—Eastern Shore this morning or the MP from Îles-de-la-Madeleine yesterday before the committee because he might have learned something.
Let us set the record straight on one thing. The major mistakes in the destruction of the northern cod were made when the Government of Canada decided to destroy the food of the cod. The first action it took was in 1990 off the coast of the hon. member's riding, Sackville—Eastern Shore.
The squid caught on the Quebec coast and the coast of Nova Scotia and the coast of New Brunswick and the Gaspé coast and the coast of Newfoundland are actually born in Florida. They travel up the coast of the United States in a thin black line. The fishermen call it the trans-Canada highway of the squid. They go up the coast of Nova Scotia and into the gulf and around Quebec and P.E.I. and up around the coast of Newfoundland.
In 1990, the federal government approved five foreign nations using factory freezer trawlers to put down nets with one-half inch mesh—