Mr. Speaker, I certainly appreciate the comments and expertise my colleague from St. John's brings to the fisheries portfolio. I thank him on behalf of all Canadians, especially Atlantic Canadians for recognizing the importance of asking for this debate, and having the debate granted through going to the Speaker's office. It is an extremely timely and important debate.
What the debate comes down to is very simple. It is about overfishing on the Grand Banks, outside the 200 mile limit and the question of what we are doing about it. Unfortunately, my belief is we are doing very little about it. I do not expect we would have been doing anything about it today, tomorrow or yesterday had my colleague not asked the question in the House.
Why is it that we picked up a foreign trawler on a polluting offence and suddenly found moratorium cod in hold? There is something wrong. We are not doing our job on the Grand Banks. We do not have enough fisheries officers, patrol vessels, aircraft or helicopters. We have ignored it and the government has been especially guilty of ignoring it.
Members of the government have tried to say that there has not been a serious problem of overfishing on the Grand Banks and outside the 200 mile limit since 1995. I am sorry but that is a joke and it is not a very funny joke. Obviously there have been violations of overfishing and a lot of them, and we just have not been checking.
We were not checking yesterday. We caught them by accident. We were looking for something else. Do not think that a month, six months or a year ago they did not have the same moratorium cod in their holds because they did. Now we are going to shut the Faroe Islands out of Canadian ports. Excuse me. Did nobody in this place hear tell of St. Pierre and Miquelon? It is not like they cannot go to port on the east coast of North America. They can.
St. Pierre may not have the same freezer capability that Newfoundland has but it certainly has the capability to supply the boats. We need an important directive to put the fisheries officers, the ships and the coast guard vessels on the high seas to board these ships and check on their holds to see if they have moratorium species onboard.
NAFO is comprised of 18 countries. It is not just the Faroe Islands. It is Bulgaria, Canada, Cuba, Denmark, Estonia, the European Union, France, Iceland, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Ukraine and the United States. There are a lot more ships to check than just the ships from the Faroe Islands.
Go back to Tobin who seemed to get a lot of publicity because he pulled one liner out of one Spanish trawler, the Estai , in 1995. The next day the Spaniards and Portuguese were overfishing and using liners and their nets on the Grand Banks. We ignored them and then we tried to buy them off with turbot. They would not go away and we got fined. That is not a plan. That is nothing. That is ridiculous.
At least he raised the issue and for that I give him credit. However, we cannot turn our backs on the issue for the next five years and say it is not going on. It is going on but we are not looking.
At the NAFO meeting in Denmark in January, we showed evidence of fishing infractions by Russia, Portugal and other European fleets. They included the use of small mesh nets, directed fishing of prohibited species like cod, excessive bycatch of species under moratorium, like cod, exceeding quota limits in groundfish and in the shrimp fisheries and the misreporting of catch information.
I would like to ask the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans what has been done about that. We know the infractions are occurring. What has been done? We are telling the Faroese that they cannot dock in Newfoundland or Nova Scotia. I am sure they will dock on St. Pierre and Miquelon or they will use freezer trawlers and they will freeze their species on the high seas. They can certainly take it back frozen.
We need a better plan than just simply reacting to circumstances. It is just not sufficient.