Mr. Speaker, first of all, I wish to thank the Speaker of the House of Commons for the opportunity for members of Parliament from all parties to debate what I consider to be a serious issue facing this country today.
I also wish to honour all those firefighters who are here in Ottawa today lobbying on behalf of their members across the country for serious issues. We congratulate them on their lobbying efforts and wish them good luck and Godspeed in the future.
Many people have asked me over the last few days why I do not ask the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans to resign. I do not think that will help in the debate. I happen to like the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans as a human being. He is a decent person and a good family man. I do not blame this entire action on him. I blame it on the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the government for the inaction that it has displayed over the years, especially to the good people in Newfoundland and Labrador. We cannot go forward unless we know where we have been.
I want to honour and commend all the elected officials, the members of Parliament, the MLAs and the municipally elected people of Newfoundland and Labrador for the great work that they have done. I honour those members of Parliament from Newfoundland and Labrador, Liberals and Tories--unfortunately, there are no New Democrats, but we are working on it--for their outspokenness in defending the interests of their people. They should be congratulated and I say that in a non-partisan manner.
In 1949, when Canada had the privilege of joining the province of Newfoundland and Labrador in Confederation, those people in Newfoundland and Labrador gave Canada one of the finest, richest, most plentiful resources in the history of any transfer of one nation to another. It was the fisheries resource.
We should ask ourselves, in the last 54 years have the people in Newfoundland and Labrador been well served by Liberal and Conservative governments on the protection of the fish stock? The answer is an incredible no.
Since 1989 the government and other governments have spent over $5 billion of Canadian taxpayers' money readjusting the east coast fisheries. Where are we today? We should ask ourselves as taxpayers, are we well served by our tax dollars in this department? This department gets $1.4 billion of taxpayers' money every year to do one thing and one thing only: to protect the habitat of wild fish and protect the wild fish themselves.
However, on all three coasts and in inland waters it is the most resoundingly disgraceful display of management that I have ever seen. I have been on the fisheries committee since 1997. There have been close to 20 reports handed to the government. The vast majority have been unanimous. It is unbelievable that our 1998 report of the east coast report that was chaired by George Baker of Newfoundland was completely ignored by the government. If action had been taken on those recommendations in 1998, I am sure we would not be here tonight debating the decline of the cod stocks.
In 1973 the then Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, Romeo LeBlanc, cancelled and cut out the fisheries research board. That started the decline of science in our fisheries.
This is where I go to the thrust of my speech. What the minister and his department are doing, knowingly or unknowingly, is dishonest to the people of Canada. If we were to privatize the resource into corporate hands, we should tell the people of Canada and the fishermen and their families exactly what we were doing. That started with the 1982 Kirby report when National Sea Products and Fishery Products International were created. That started the corporatization of our fish stocks in this country.
In 1996 we had the Mifflin plan on the west coast. Overnight half the commercial fishermen were gone. Anyone who was in Sointula when we did our west coast reports in 1999 will remember the fishermen in their forties with their families crying before the committee. They were crying with tears in their eyes and asking why the government did that to them. Our only answer was that the government was privatizing a common property resource into the hands of the corporations. Look at the west coast now. One man, Jimmy Paterson, effectively controls over 45% of the salmon stocks on the west coast of Canada.
That is ridiculous and uncalled for, which is why I am really upset with Mr. Crosbie, the former fisheries minister of Canada, who is now in Newfoundland. He says that the only way to solve this problem is through ITQs, individual transferable quotas. That is the privatization of a common property resource that belongs to all Canadians. He wants it to go into the hands of a few so that those very rich multinational corporations can make an awful lot of money off a public resource. How do they do it? They rape and pillage the resource. They give the minister no other option but to cancel out the fishery and get rid of the independent fisherman and his or her family.
They did this to the farm families on the prairies. In 2001, Saskatchewan and Alberta lost 22,000 farm families, independent people who are gone from the industry. But the land is still producing. Companies like Pioneer and Cargill have moved in and taken over. We are moving to a corporatization of our agriculture and now we are doing the exact same thing to the fishermen. That is unacceptable.
All the people in Newfoundland and Labrador and in my province of Nova Scotia, in P.E.I. and in New Brunswick, want to do is fish, look after their families and live in their ancestral homes in their communities of Port au Port, L'Anse aux Meadows, La Scie, Gaultois, Burgeo, Ramea, and it goes on and on. These are historic names in the great province of Newfoundland and Labrador.
What is the response from the federal government? It is “bye-bye, time to go”.
In my office I have a picture from Ted Stuckless, a great Newfoundland artist. It is a picture of a guy sitting up in a dory with a make and break engine. He is rolling a cigarette, he has logs in the boat, and he is dragging his home from one end of the bay to the other. At least Joey Smallwood, the former premier, had the courage to tell people he was going to resettle them. This government does not even have the courage to tell Newfoundlanders and Labradorians, “You're going to move, folks”. Anyone who does not believe that these people are going to have to move like their brothers, sisters and cousins did in 1992 is sadly mistaken. That is the legacy that this Prime Minister is going to have to wear. That is shameful and it is unacceptable. The people deserve more.
A lot of people out west where I grew up used to think of Newfoundlanders as the 10-42 club: work 10 weeks and get 42 weeks of EI. I have been to Newfoundland many times and that is not the case at all. These are hard-working people. They are industrious people. I am surrounded by them now. Their representatives are here and they have done a great job representing the people of Newfoundland and Labrador.
What is our response? How are we going to solve it now? Cut out their livelihood. Guess what we are going to do, Mr. Speaker. We are going to give them enough money for a make work project. Why? So they can get EI. And then what, Mr. Speaker? Then what are they going to do? Nothing. These people have been screwed royally by this government and it is unacceptable.
This is for the good people of Newfoundland and Labrador: I understand the frustration they have with the minister for ACOA, the minister of fisheries, the Prime Minister and everybody else, but I ask them, please, I beg of them not to burn the Canadian flag, or any other flag, for that matter. The people of Newfoundland and Labrador gave with their blood in the Battle of Beaumont Hamel, one of the greatest battles of all time. They died under the flag. We have peacekeepers from Newfoundland and Labrador who died under the Canadian flag.
I beg the fishermen, their representatives and the people in Newfoundland and Labrador. I know they are mad. I know they are angry. But I beg them not to take it out on the Canadian flag. There are other ways of doing it and more peaceful means of demonstrating their anger at this government, and we will be there to help. I will not be there by myself. I work on the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans and I am blessed and honoured to be able to work on that committee with such great people from all parties. I have worked with some great members since 1997 and I continue to do so now. It is an honour to work with that committee. That committee will be in St. John's, Newfoundland on May 7. We want to hear the people of Newfoundland and Labrador. We want to hear what we can do to present their concerns and to bring their concerns back to Ottawa. We will not let them down in this fight. We will continue to fight for them. We need to help them out.
Let me move on now to the fact that an all party committee of Newfoundland and Labrador provincial and federal representatives took a great political risk by getting together in a non-partisan manner to come up with recommendations to present to the federal government. I was honoured to hear them. The member for Bonavista--Trinity--Conception was the chair of that committee. The premier of Newfoundland, Mr. Grimes, with the opposition leader, Danny Williams, the leader of the NDP, Jack Harris, and industry representatives came up with what I thought was a very good report.
All the minister had to do was say that if the people who live by the resource, honour the resource, have a reputation on the resource, and live adjacent to the resource thought this was the way to go then he would honour that agreement. But what did the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans do? He literally slapped his own colleagues in the face by ignoring the report, absolutely ignoring it. I find that incomprehensible.
In fact, that was not the only report the minister ignored. The minister stands up and says, “I am for conservation”, but he also ignores the Fisheries Resource Conservation Council report. Let me read into the record what the council said. It is a great book. One only has to go page 6 to get the whole thrust of the report. It states:
The Council is unequivocal in stating that for both cod stocks, the urgency of the situation this year means that the “status quo” is no longer appropriate. In its analysis of a complete closure of the Gulf cod stocks, the Council concludes--
This is the minister's council.
--that this too is an unrealistic option that would in no way guarantee stock rebuilding. The difficulty the Council has with such a draconian approach--
I did not say that and the Newfoundland representatives did not say that. The Fisheries Resource Conservation Council said that.
--is that, taken on its own, it does nothing to assure prospects for an immediate, substantial and durable improvement in stock condition. Moreover, there is a view that a closed fishery--and an alienated fishing sector--would actually result in an increase in unreported mortality.
This is exactly what the member for Burin--St. George's said so eloquently. The council continued:
The Council judges this to be a real threat that could inflict continued undetected harm to the resource.
In rejecting the wholesale closure option, the Council acknowledges that only in partnership with fishermen--who must take responsibility themselves for stewardship of the resource--
That is exactly what New Democrats have been saying year after year: that we have to eliminate this top down approach of managing our fish stocks from Ottawa to the water. We must institute a policy of a community based, cooperative, co-management agreement of the fish stocks. The Fisheries Resource Conservation Council says that. This idea is not new.
Mr. Speaker, if you ever have the opportunity to go to a great island off Newfoundland, Fogo Island, you will meet people with a cooperative nature who have co-management of their fisheries resource. That is the shining light and an example of exactly how we should be moving in the direction of management of our fish stocks.
Another example of this is Sambro Fisheries Limited in my home province of Nova Scotia. This is another great example of DFO, the province, the fisheries and the community getting together to work out quotas, enforcement, scientific information, et cetera, and it works. The top down approach is no longer good enough. There are 1,600 people working for DFO at 200 Kent Street and nobody in that department fishes for cod or crab or lobster or caplin in the Rideau Canal. We have to reduce that department in Ottawa and move those people to where the resource is. That will change it around.
One of the major problems we have in fisheries management in Newfoundland and Labrador and around the country is the lack of Coast Guard patrols. Last year I was in St. John's, Newfoundland, and I asked the Coast Guard for Newfoundland and Labrador just how many patrol boats were patrolling the coast of Labrador and Newfoundland at that time. There was one. There were seven vessels altogether and one was patrolling the waters. I asked where it was: in the harbour.
Where is the enforcement? Where is it? This is unbelievable. We do all these reports and give them to the minister and he shuts them down every single time.
Now I come to the other crux of the matter. The all party committee of fisheries and oceans of the House of Commons did a report on foreign overfishing in the 200 mile limit. Last year, we heard that the Russian vessel Olga had 49 metric tonnes of moratorium cod in its hold. It was not allowed to have those fish on its boat. What happened? The ship was sent back to Russia. For what? What was the Russian government going to do to the captain and the fisheries?
I have a document from people within the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. It is a Russian manifest of fish caught before April 8, 2002. This is the type of document I am never privileged to have. There are certain people in DFO who had the courage and the chutzpah to forward this type of information to members of Parliament so we can expose the truth.
My good friend from Burin--St. George's has advised me that the people of Gaultois cannot fish for redfish. Why? Because there is a huge bycatch of cod in that area and they cannot risk it, but this Russian vessel was caught before April 8, 2002, with 269,000 kilograms of redfish. The bycatch of cod was 7,650 kilograms. Also, on the hold of this ship was found 990 kilograms of frozen cod liver. To have that amount of cod liver in a boat, they would have had to catch 66,000 pounds of codfish. That cod is under moratorium. What are they doing with that fish in the hold?
That is one vessel out of the hundreds that are raping and pillaging our oceans. We are the coastal state and we have the responsibility to protect those fish stocks. What does the minister say? He says, “There is not much we can do, folks, we are just going to have to shut out the Newfoundland and Labrador fishermen and get rid of them. We will appease the foreigners and take care of the corporations and tell those hard-working, decent people in Newfoundland and Labrador and Quebec that they cannot have any, that these ships will come into the ports of Newfoundland and Labrador and they will brag about all the fish they catch”.
Another thing in regard to these boats was the Tynda , operated by Master Vladimir Shakmaev. There were 34,000 kilograms of fish meal in the hold of the ship. There would have to be 580,000 pounds of groundfish to have that much fish meal. None of that groundfish was reported. What type of groundfish was it? We do not know. It could easily have been cod. It could have been haddock, pollock, plaice or turbot.