Mr. Chairman, in answer to the question of the hon. member, I could give you some very concrete examples. Let us take aquaculture, for instance.
In the area of aquaculture, the main purpose of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans was to carry out research. We now realize that we do not know much about aquaculture. Besides our capacity to farm fish, our knowledge in that area is quite limited.
We have paid the price for that lack of knowledge in the Gaspé area. A plant opened its doors about ten years ago, but then had to close down. Nowadays, we have changed direction and turned towards other sectors.
We do not have adequate knowledge. One of the roles of the department is to invest enough in research so that it knows what the impact will be.
Some people mentioned Atlantic salmon farming on the west coast. My hon. colleague talked about it. What do we know about the impact of Atlantic salmon farming off the coast of British Columbia? Not much, right now.
We are starting to find out about it, but unfortunately, we should have invested much more money in research to determine the impact early on before any industry became overdeveloped and too many problems resulted.
When talking about the U.N., some people mentioned earlier the precautionary principle that was approved in Rio. The Government of Canada knows about it. It signed these agreements in 1992, in 2001 and again in 2002. None of this was implemented however, because we have not invested enough in research. It is as simple as that.