Mr. Speaker, on Tuesday, October 26 Mr. Dan Edwards, a Ucluelet west coast fisherman, began a hunger strike to protest the unwillingness of the federal government to negotiate a fair and transparent process to deal with the 1999 Fraser River sockeye crisis.
This desperate action was initiated after two months of due process when one of the largest alliances in the B.C. fishing community tried to move the federal government to establish a proper consultative process to deal with the disaster surrounding the worst collapse of the Fraser River sockeye in its 100 years of recorded history.
Mr. Edwards' concerns are consistent with the recent report of the auditor general and they are consistent with native and non-native fishermen in Nova Scotia. His concerns are founded on the fundamental struggle to achieve a fair, inclusive and accountable process for multi-stakeholder decision making.
The people in the communities he represents are already suffering from massive unemployment, almost total disenfranchisement from the nearby resources, and social and economic infrastructure collapse. Much of it is caused by—