Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member from Nova Scotia for reminding me to talk about the observer reports to which the junior minister of fisheries and oceans has referred. He said saying that we had all these wonderful observer reports with which to write this report.
The fact is that we were denied access to them. We put a motion to the committee asking for observer reports. We made numerous requests through the chair who was fired for demanding the observer reports. The government offered the reports to us in camera. It said it would give the reports to us in secret but we could not let the Canadian people see them because there was a lot of stuff it did not want Canadians to see.
We were not given the observer reports. The Government of Canada kept them secret. Why? It was because they are ineffective. We later learned that the observers on foreign vessels were coming from the nations where the vessels came from. They report when they get back to the port of their flag country. They are meaningless and the government would not release those reports.
The ones we obtained where we actually had some input contained numerous violations by foreign states in Canadian waters of which the Government of Canada was aware. What did we learn? We learned there was no way the government would prosecute them or pursue them.
We never saw the observer reports to which the junior minister of fisheries and oceans refers. That is all on the record.