Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for St. John's West for bringing the debate to the House of Commons. I also thank the Speaker for allowing the debate to take place. It should have taken place a long time ago. However I am glad we are able to debate the issue tonight.
I will mention a couple of things. First, when we refer to the Flemish Cap and the nose and tail of the Grand Banks we are referring to something we call the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. Let us remember that. It is the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. It is not the Grand Banks of Lithuania. It is not the Grand Banks of the Faroe Islands. It is not the Grand Banks of Russia, Japan or China. It is the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.
Second, in the early seventies former Prime Minister Trudeau said the problem with fish is that they swim. He was absolutely correct. In 1979 the hon. member for Winnipeg--Transcona who is from Winnipeg took time in his maiden speech to talk about overfishing on our high seas. That was in 1979. I thought I would let members in on that little historical fact.
The Liberal government and previous governments have ignored the issue to date. They have tried to use diplomacy when diplomacy has failed. It is time to take serious action. Atlantic cod stocks are in serious trouble. The wild Atlantic salmon is in serious trouble. The turbot or Greenland halibut is in trouble. The redfish is in trouble. There are a couple of reasons for this within our 200 mile limit but we know why it is so outside the 200 mile limit.
I applaud the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans for his words today. I know he is bilingual but he is talking out of both sides of his mouth. One minute he says we cannot take unilateral action because the rest of the world may be upset with us. The next minute he says we will take whatever action is deemed necessary. We cannot have it both ways. Either he will stand up for Canadian fishermen and the fish the planet relies on for its food source, or he will not.
Let us be clear. We are talking about extending the Flemish Cap and the nose and tail of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland to the 350 mile limit to include the entire continental shelf. We are not saying all foreigners must leave. We are not saying the boats that operate in those waters must go. We are saying it is time we took over because NAFO has failed. It is time Canada took custodial management of the area to set quotas and enforce penalties. That is what my Liberal, Conservative, Alliance and Bloc colleagues on the fisheries committee heard. It is what we have all agreed to informally although we have not yet put it in our report.
On the subject of enforcement, the committee was in Newfoundland recently. I asked a gentleman from the coast guard how many vessels were patrolling the waters of Newfoundland and Labrador for fisheries violators. This was a few days ago. His answer was none. There were zero. Not one vessel, coast guard or military, was patrolling the waters of Newfoundland and Labrador to look for fishing violations. Their surveillance aircraft was on the ground. They do not have the budget to maintain that type of surveillance and enforcement.
Provincial Airlines Limited does contract work for DFO in terms of surveillance. It does a good job. However it has only one surveillance aircraft, sometimes two. It does not have the funding from the Government of Canada to do more surveillance. It is willing to provide the surveillance but the federal government does not give it the funding.
Why we do not unilaterally take over the continental shelf and tell the rest of the world what we are doing and why we are doing it based on the evidence before us? One reason is that DFAIT representatives appeared at the committee before we left and gave an entire 20 minute speech on why it could not be done.
My hon. colleague from Scarborough asked them a good question. He said it was the same argument they would have given the minister in 1976. He was absolutely correct. The government bureaucracy is timid, shy and nervous. I do not know why. The greatest advice I can give the minister is to completely ignore the officials at DFAIT. He should brush them aside. He should not return their calls. He should get rid of them. If that is their approach the people at DFAIT have absolutely no sense of responsibility. They do not care about the fish stocks off our east coast. If that is the analysis they give us it is absolutely incredible they are still employed by the Government of Canada.
In 1992 on behalf of Jack Harris, leader of the provincial NDP in Newfoundland and Labrador, we had a resolution before our convention. We resolved:
—that the New Democratic Party calls upon the Government of Canada to instruct their representatives at these conferences, to duly notify the participants that, unless overfishing on the Nose and Tail of the Grand Banks ceases by January 1, 1993, Canada should immediately take the necessary steps to assume custodial management of the fisheries in that area.
That was in 1992, 10 years ago. Today the foreign affairs minister was asked when he would ratify the law of the sea. He said not to worry, the government would do it. How many fisheries ministers and foreign affairs ministers have told the House of Commons they would ratify the law of the sea? We signed it 20 years ago. We are still waiting for the government to ratify the law of the sea. I do not want to sound partisan but it begs the question of how serious the government takes the issues we heard when our committee travelled to the east coast.
There was a gentleman here by the name of Mr. Tobin. We all know about the Estai affair. It looked good. He looked tough. He said he would protect the little halibut and turbot that were hanging on to the continental shelf by their fingertips. The reality is that the ship went back to Spain with all the fish and we paid the money. What did we get out of it? We put observers aboard foreign vessels. I do not know if members have seen a report from any of the observers. We got one in committee a few years ago that was all blacked out and whited out. We could not make out anything.
The countries that fish in the Flemish Cap and the nose and tail of the Grand Banks have their own citizens as observers aboard their ships. There are no Canadian observers aboard the ships to review their procedures. In many cases the observers' reports mean absolutely nothing because there is only one observer on the ships. The ships fish 24-7. That is one of the major problems.
We along with the hon. member for St. John's West are asking that we take custodial management and control of the entire continental shelf off our coastlines as quickly as possible. We need to assume full responsibility for the Grand Banks of Newfoundland so that we are the enforcers, managers and custodians. We would then look after the resource and divvy it up as we deemed necessary.
On a more personal note, since 1990 total landings for the sea fisheries are down by more than half a million metric tonnes.
I have some statistics from the great province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Since 1990, 40,000 people have left that beautiful province. The Burgeo, Trepassey and St. John's fish plants have closed. In Marystown the workforce is down from 1,000 people working 52 weeks to 650 people working just 26 weeks and they are lucky to have that.
I want to stress something very clearly. In editorials across the country there is the perception that the people of Newfoundland and Labrador who work in the fish plants want to work just long enough to get their weeks to qualify to go on EI. What utter nonsense. The mayor of Burgeo and others said at the committee that there was a time when people in that town worked 52 weeks a year at that fish plant. That is what the people of Newfoundland and Labrador are doing. For anyone to accuse them of being lazy is simply irresponsible.
Not only has the government given up on its responsibility for the protection of fish and fish habitat, it has also given up on the people of Newfoundland and Labrador. We simply cannot go on with this any more.
At the fisheries committee I have raised an issue with DFAIT officials and other people. We are going back to NAFO in September and we are going to discuss our concerns. If the government is serious about having NAFO talks, those talks should be in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador. Bring the world to St. John's. Have those meetings there. With the evidence before them, Canada should tell them “If you do not resolve these issues on your own, we will resolve them for you”.
The government is going to have these talks in September. I ask the minister and everyone else. What will it do in October? The member from the Bloc Quebecois is absolutely right. It will probably talk some more. The time for talk is over. I am certainly not advocating gunboat diplomacy. That is wrong. I am advocating that the government show some backbone.
It is also unconscionable that the former minister of fisheries, now the Minister of Natural Resources, and the former Minister of Industry, Mr. Tobin, knew these infractions took place last September and nobody in the House was aware of it. Those two gentlemen, members of the cabinet, knew exactly what was going on and refused to tell anyone in the House or the people of Newfoundland and Labrador.
What did the government do? In January it went to the NAFO talks in Denmark to express its concern. According to Mr. Pat Chamut we did not win a thing at those talks.
The minister himself has said “We will go back in September and talk about it again”. What is he going to do in October? If we could have asked the minister a question, my question would have been what will be done on October 1 to protect those stocks and protect the interests of Newfoundland and Labrador and the rest of Canada?
Not only that, the fact is these countries from overseas have absolutely no responsibility toward these stocks. By taking control of that, Canada will be doing them a favour. The management through NAFO simply is not working. It has failed. It was a nice try but it has failed.
We have jurisdictional responsibility for the ocean floor for 350 miles, but we do not have it above the water table after 200 miles. We are asking for that control.
When the member for Gander--Grand Falls was the committee chairperson, he expressed this same issue many times. I want to give credit where credit is due. I work on the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans in the Parliament of Canada and we are chaired by an outstanding gentleman, the member for Malpeque. He does an outstanding job for our committee.
If the government will not listen to the member for St. John's West, or to me from Nova Scotia or to my colleagues from Quebec or British Columbia, then I encourage the government to at least listen to the member for Malpeque because he heard the same thing we did.