Mr. Speaker, allow me to say that I will be sharing my time with my colleague on the fisheries committee, the hon. member for Bras d'Or--Cape Breton.
I am very pleased to take part in the debate this evening. I will begin by congratulating the hon. member for St. John's West for bringing this matter to the attention of the House. I also want to congratulate the Speaker for permitting an emergency debate on this very important subject.
What is the subject? Tonight in my speech I am speaking to people like me from urban settings in Canada. What is the topic? The hon. member for St John's West put it succinctly in his letter of March 20, 2002, to the Speaker. I quote: “the negative effect of foreign overfishing on the entire region of Atlantic Canada”. That says it all in one short phrase.
One might ask what I, a member from an urban riding, Scarborough Southwest, am doing speaking on this very important subject. My answer to that is this. Scarborough Southwest is a completely urban riding. My southern boundary is Lake Ontario, but having said that, there are no fishing interests in Scarborough Southwest. However, listening to my colleagues in caucus over the years, I have heard members and colleagues of mine, particularly members from the Atlantic region, talking about the problems with the fisheries, the difficulties their constituents were having and the difficulties the fisheries problems were causing in the economies of their people. Quite frankly, I found it rather difficult to relate to those lamentations because I had nothing with which to compare it. I decided it was time to learn about the subject matter firsthand and I asked to become a member of the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans.
I want to tell the House that in the time I have been a member of the committee I have listened to many witnesses, I have travelled with the committee, I have seen many of the areas concerned, I have talked to the people concerned, and I have learned. I want to tell Canadians that I have learned a number of things, but above all two very important lessons.
The first one is that fish and fishing are critically important to Canadians on our coasts and in particular to Atlantic Canada and especially Newfoundland. Newfoundland's reason for being, as we were told by witnesses, is the fish in and around that beautiful island, for which people have fished for hundreds of years until recently.
Second, I have learned that fishing is important not only to the coastal economy but to the entire economy of Canada and to the people of Canada. After all, if fishing is bad, fishermen cannot make a living and those of us in the rest of Canada come to their aid financially. That is the nature of our federation. If one part needs help, the others help. Clearly if fishermen can fish, then they can earn a living and the rest of Canada does not need to come to their aid. That is what fishermen want to do. They want to fish. They do not want to sit idly by and watch foreigners take our fish.
Our committee just returned from Atlantic Canada where we got an earful. We learned a number of things. Many of the speakers have already mentioned these things, but it is important to restate that our cod stocks, which have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, have been decimated. There has been a moratorium on cod since 1990 or thereabouts, I believe. We heard that there are 7 million harp seals, not 7 million seals but 7 million harp seals alone, and there are all kinds of other species. Those seals need to eat. They are predators. They eat fish. The cod is gone. What do they eat? They eat other fish. If they eat other fish, there are less species that we Canadians can fish.
What are we to do about that? Or are we to hide from that because it is politically incorrect to talk about seals and what to do with them when the predators start taking the very livelihood of our families and our children? We have to grapple with that.
We heard very compelling witnesses, particularly in Newfoundland and Labrador. My hon. colleague from Nanaimo mentioned a name. I was struck with one phrase that Trevor Taylor, a member of the house of assembly and the opposition fisheries critic, said. He stated “As goes the fishing, so goes Newfoundland and Labrador”. That is so true. If there is no fishing, the people of Newfoundland and Labrador are gone.
We heard the hon. member for Burin--St. George's talk about the population decline. People are leaving the rock, as they say, to go to other places. There is nothing wrong with their coming to my riding but they do not want to come to Scarborough necessarily when they have been fishing all their lives, when their parents and grandparents have fished and that is all they have known and it is what they are good at.
The minister of fisheries, Gerry Reid, talked about the crisis in the fishing industry and how stocks are being pillaged for foreign overfishing. Allister Hann, the mayor of Burgeo, told us that his town has pretty well folded up because of the lack of fishing. Tony Hewitt, the mayor of the town of Trepassey, talked about what a wonderful town it was, how lively it was and how there was full employment. Auditoriums and various things were being built for the people. The fishery is decimated and the town is decimated. Its population is half of what it used to be because there is no fishing. That is what negative overfishing does to people. This is an issue of people.
What is the problem with foreign fishing? We have a jurisdiction of 200 nautical miles from our shores. I am not going to get into the long history of all of this. I will simply say that some of the richest fishing grounds in the world are centred around Newfoundland. Everyone knows them as the Grand Banks. Most of them are within the 200 mile economic zone.
There are three little areas that are outside of that 200 nautical mile zone. They are known as the nose and tail of the Grand Banks and the Flemish Cap. They are just outside the zone which means that foreign fleets can go there to fish. Quite frankly in the absence of any agreement, they could pillage that resource. We are not talking about ground fish which stay in one spot. We are talking about fish that straddle inside and outside of the area because they swim. Many of those are the commercial fish that we are talking about in the economy of Newfoundland.
What are the foreign fleets doing and what have they done? This has been proven and demonstrated internationally. They have raped and pillaged the fishery at will. That had to stop and lo and behold we came up with NAFO. NAFO, as has been mentioned by many members, is the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization.
Of course like good Canadians we tried the legal route, which is the correct way to start. We have done everything we possibly can to get the 17 contracting parties to abide by the rules and regulations that we have come up with in NAFO.
Sadly, based on what I and the committee have heard, NAFO is a toothless tiger, plain and simple. There is no punishment. There is no deterrence.
We saw that recently when the Russian trawler was caught by chance for polluting our waters. The hold was opened up. What was in there? A banned species of fish which the Russians had obviously been fishing. What did we do about it? Absolutely nothing. There is nothing we can do about it. We cannot even touch the fish because it was not under NAFO that they were caught. It was under environmental protection. What kind of an agreement is it when a fishing trawler is caught red-handed and nothing can be done about it? It is ridiculous and it has to stop.
It is critically important that we go to NAFO in September, that we lay out the minimum criteria we expect from these nations and tell them that if they do not enforce NAFO regulations, we will walk out. We will extend custodial management. We will protect the fish stocks. We will protect the people of Atlantic Canada. We will make sure that if they do not, we will. I call upon everyone to get behind Atlantic fishermen and look after their interests.