Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for the question. Let me first pay tribute to the people who work in the Coast Guard. Let me pay tribute to the people who work at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans at the local level, to the people who work in St. John's, to the people who try to do the best they can with the resources they have.
However, it is in the resources where we find the problem. Are we properly surveilling? Do we have an enforcement mechanism to look after blatant abuses in those areas? The answer is no.
In the fisheries committee we are now doing a study on the Coast Guard. For a lot of last year our Coast Guard boats were tied up simply because they could not afford fuel. We have copies of directives telling Coast Guard forces to reduce speeds to reduce fuel and to only go to sea when they have to. That is not the way to protect a coast and to prevent people from overfishing.
We need more money. We need more resources given to the people who are only too willing to do the job. The people on the ground, as we say, or in this case on the sea, have no problems doing the job. They do a tremendous job.
I mentioned aerial surveillance. We have the best aerial surveillance anywhere in the world. A Newfoundland company, Provincial Airlines, does a tremendous job under charter to the department, but their base of coverage is limited. If we could expand that, we would know a lot more about what is going on out there and we would prevent a tremendous amount of overfishing and abuse.
To answer the member's question, what we need is more resources, properly focused, but what we need most of all is some leadership from government and that is something we have not seen.