Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the hon. member for his question. I know he stayed in Ottawa to debate this bill. His committee is travelling in the Northwest Territories at the present time and I am sure his presence will be missed. I am sure I would miss him if I was there.
He has a number of questions and I think some of them have already been answered this morning. One of his questions concerns TAGS, about which considerable pressure is coming to bear on the government. We know that the old TAGS was far from perfect. There were a lot of holes in it. We intended to help a lot of people with that $1.9 billion, but many are still in need of assistance.
The reason is because part-way through the process we took money allocated for the buy back program and for training and put it into personal support because of the underestimation of the number of people that would be included in TAGS. The program was running out of money very rapidly, so money was taken out of two vital sectors and used for income support when it probably should have been used to take fishermen out of the program altogether.
The new program must be designed to take people out of the fishery, but also to ensure that there are enough fishermen left to have a sustainable groundfish fishery off the Atlantic coast.
The member also mentioned zone 12 crab. I think he is aware that probably this week the zone 12 management plan for crab will be announced by the minister.
The only way a fishery can be continued in Canada, whether it is on the Pacific, on the north or on the Atlantic coast, and the only way for small fishing villages to survive is to have a sustainable fishing industry. If we continue to overfish, as we have done in the past, we will continue to have the same attitude and pressures that were prevalent when some of our fish plant workers did not get enough work and pressure was put on for them to continue to work so they could collect EI. That created a reliance on the EI system.
This type of thinking has to change. We have to think of the resource first. If there are not enough fish, there are not enough fish. It takes a while. I know we are dealing with families. We are dealing with the ability of individuals to put food on their table, but at the same time if we continue in this way there will come a time when no one will have any weeks in the fish plants in Atlantic Canada. We have to look at managing the resource in a sustainable way so that it will be there not only for the present but for the future.