Madam Chairman, that is exactly it. I will simply give Newfoundland as an example.
With the committee, in Newfoundland, we met their minister of fisheries and some of his predecessors, as well as industry stakeholders. What they told me—and I will never forget what I heard in St. Johns, Newfoundland—was this: since 1949, that is since they handed management of the fisheries over to the federal government, things have gone from bad to worse.
There is a reason for this. It is because the federal government was unable to manage the resource. It did not invest enough in research. We do not even know as yet what the real problems affecting the resource are, whether in the gulf or off Newfoundland, and in the Maritime provinces.
Someone has already brought up the seal question. Seals eat a lot, and my colleague has cited some examples, but do we know what one eats in a year? Not yet. There has not been sufficient investment in research for us to know that a seal eats x pounds of cod. What the scientists tell us is that there has not been sufficient research to provide an accurate answer.
There ought to have been sufficient investment, as soon as DFO was created and took over management of the resource, to provide proper knowledge of the resource so as to manage it properly. But that is not what happened. As one of my colleagues has said, the fisheries have never been of any great importance to this government.
It is no big deal to make 4,000 people unemployed tomorrow morning, or so we are being told.