Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with my colleague from Fundy—Royal.
It is my pleasure to rise today to speak to my party's motion urging the government to give urgent consideration to the immediate and long term needs of Canada's agriculture and fishing industries. The livelihood of many families in my riding depends a lot on our natural resources.
The Liberal government has ignored the rural communities far too long. Members on the other side of the House have waited for crises to go on and on before trying inadequately to resolve them. Rural Canadians have had enough. It is time for the government to provide leadership, a long term vision and workable solutions for Canada's fishery and agriculture sectors.
The government did not prepare for the Marshall decision of the Supreme Court of Canada which acknowledged fishing, hunting and gathering rights for Canada's aboriginal people. The government should have prepared a plan for this decision.
We all knew the supreme court was to make a decision on this case. This decision has effectively pitted native and non-native fishers against each other as their leaders try to determine how the lucrative lobster fishery should be regulated in light of the recent supreme court ruling. Actually it has gone beyond native and non-native fishers to communities fighting each other. That is the sad situation we are seeing in Atlantic Canada right now.
Conservation is an important issue. We should not forget the auditor general's warning last spring that the shellfish fishery is in danger.
Chapter 4 of the auditor general's report tabled on April 20 voiced some serious concerns about the way Fisheries and Oceans Canada has been managing the lobster, scallop, snow crab and shrimp fisheries.
According to the auditor general:
The absence of a formal fisheries policy that fully reflects sustainability concepts means that decisions on resource use are made on an ad hoc and inconsistent basis rather than as part of an overall framework for achieving a sustainable fishery.
As we are doing here today, the auditor general decries the government's lack of vision in the fisheries industry. In 1997 he expressed similar concerns about groundfish stocks. The government did not learn a lesson from this, and now the shellfish and crustacean fisheries are involved.
It is important for the government to realize that everything is interrelated and that whole communities suffer when the crops or the catches are poor. The fishermen, farmers and other workers in these industries are seasonal workers and are therefore victims of discrimination by our employment insurance system.
As if it were not enough to place these industries in a precarious position, the government then refuses to give the workers in them any proper assistance. These workers, who pay into the program, often live in regions where the economy is not active enough to allow them to find work in the off season.
In my riding, there are a number of cases where people have no income from January on. They have worked long and hard during the season but do not have any money coming in for long periods of time and cannot support their families because of the discrimination this government practices toward them.
I recently visited the food banks in my riding of Beauséjour-Petitcodiac. Everyone involved blamed the cuts to employment insurance for the increase in users. This is a serious situation.
I am urging the government to have a vision for rural Canada. I realize it cannot have a vision for rural Canada until it understands what rural Canada means, and it does not care enough to try to learn. It does not have a vision.
Even if the government had a vision for rural Canada right now I would be afraid of what that vision would be because until it goes out to see what is happening in rural Canada it cannot have a vision. We cannot treat with something that is not working. We cannot treat sick people with medication if we do not know what we are treating them for. We have to find out what is the problem.
That is what we see going on in our regions and in our rural communities. This is why the employment insurance program was destroyed, was run in a way that no longer takes the needs of our people into account. These people include fishers and workers in factories, tourism and construction.
This government is refusing to understand what is going on. My colleague from the Reform Party spoke of suicide among farmers. It is sad to see that happening, and I can understand how sad it is in the west at the moment with the suicide rate. I have seen that happening in the Atlantic region since the start of the employment insurance reforms. I know of people no longer with us today, who killed themselves or whose heart gave out because they no longer had an income and no longer met the requirements to qualify for employment insurance.
There are now two major problems, and I wonder just when the Liberal government is going to realize that we do not all live in major urban centres. There is a Canada outside these centres, rural Canada. The government has to accept and recognize that and work with these communities. It is time this government showed some leadership. This is what we need, and the fact that we do not have it is sad.