Mr. Chairman, I want to congratulate my colleague for making the effort of putting his question to me in French. If memory serves, he once was minister of education in Newfoundland. He just proved his openmindedness, and for that I congratulate him.
Indeed, in managing the fishery, knowledge of the resource is essential. To manage any resource, one has to have a good knowledge of that resource. I think that, in the past, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the whole government probably, or I should say certainly, did not put enough money into research to have a good knowledge of our fish resources.
This is one of the problems that we are facing today. After the lesson learned in 1992, the government should have invested heavily in research in order to acquire a good knowledge of the resource, but it did not. Had it done so, maybe we might not be facing the possibility of another moratorium today.
We must invest heavily in research. When we have a good knowledge of the resource, we will be able to manage it properly. I think that this is very important. It is something that we have not done in the past and that I hope we will do in the future.
Of course, we have started to invest again, but so far these investments are very small compared to the enormous needs. We have not built up knowledge in the past and we have not invested enough, which means that we have a lot of ground to make up. That is the problem that we are facing now.