Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to address the private member's bill by my colleague for South Surrey—White Rock—Langley.
I do not want to address the bill directly but I do want to make a point about how urgent legislation such as this is by drawing to the attention of the House two examples.
Since being elected there have been two examples of mass killing and selling of wildlife. In the first one, I received a phone call from a citizen in Clinton, British Columbia, on Highway 97 going north. I was told about a semi-trailer truck that stopped in front of a house. The trailer was full of sacks of frozen salmon. The salmon apparently had come from the Fraser River and were heading eastward for sale. I do not know where. I would guess probably Alberta and the Prairies.
The person was concerned that such a large number of fish would be going out, and obviously they were not legally caught fish. I contacted the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the response I received was that unless I had a licence number there was nothing it could do.
It is interesting that while there was so little concern for that, there have been a number of instances where the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has been quite happy to charge people with destroying fish habitat when the person involved was trying to save his house by unplugging a dam that was causing flooding.
A court case is going on in my riding right now because a large flood of Big Creek took out a person's hay fields and was endangering his house. He put a machine in the creek to unplug the dam that was causing the flood. He is in court now for destroying fish habitat.
The other instance I want to bring to the attention of the House is a conversation I had with a guide-outfitter in Anaham Lake, an aboriginal man who showed me his licences and the maps of his guiding territory. He was concerned about the number of semi-trailer loads of moose that were being killed and taken out of his region. His primary concern was that there were enough of those animals being taken out that it was endangering his livelihood.
The point I am making is that this is not a tiny little problem where once in a while a bear is killed and perhaps a part of the bear is sold to someone who may ship it to China or some other country where these parts are valuable. That is wrong. I would not disagree that people doing that should be charged. However the point I am making is that this is not just the odd part. These are truckloads of animals that, by my constituent's reports, have been seen and have been sent out of the country.
I think that as the House considers this private member's bill it should be aware that this is a large problem in some rural parts of our country.