Madam Speaker, as I said, I could go on and on about the problems in the labour field. Certainly the devastation of the fisheries on the west coast is something that has been a repeat of what occurred on the east coast. One would think that the government would get it right. Instead, it continues to make the same mistakes right across the country.
In my riding of Nanaimo--Cowichan, boats are in dry dock. There has been a buy back program. People who used to be in the fishing industry are no longer there because the government simply said that there were too many people fishing and that it had to do something about the stocks so it bought back their boats and their licences.
Along with that, some promises were made that we would get stocks back if we made a concerted effort to conserve the stocks, and no one was against that, but we wanted to make sure that the stocks came back.
For my hon. colleague's illumination, this year we had a huge return on the sockeye salmon run. One would think the government would then say to the fishermen that because it had been somewhat successful in bringing back the stocks that the fishermen could actually go out there and fish.
Fishermen have phoned me to ask if I, as their MP, could do something so that they could at least get back out there and have a few more days to actually fish. There was no way. The government let one opening come up and it allowed the fishermen to get back out there but most of the fishermen on the west coast were only allowed to catch between 20% and 25% of their quota even though there were fish going by them all the time.
What has happened is that now DFO is up on the Adams River zapping fish because there were so many that got by because they did not count properly. Is that conservation? Is that allowing people to have jobs and a livelihood? That is the result of Liberal government intervention in an industry that I think it views as a sunset industry. What a shame.