He should be ashamed of himself.
People in Newfoundland and Labrador are very concerned that the federal government is not listening.
We look at the seals. We are going to spend $6 million to understand what is going on with seals in relation to cod. Anyone in their right mind knows right up front what seals and the cod are doing, and if they do not they probably should get a bit of a history lesson about where it is going. Right now spending $6 million on research in that area alone is a total waste of the taxpayers' money. The federal government has no plan and, as a result of that, it does not know where it is going.
I can tell the House what the federal government should be doing. How are we going to reduce that whole seal population? We know how seals are born. I would have had a lot more respect for the federal fisheries minister if he had said on the day he announced the closure of the cod that he would give the offshore boats a quota to hunt the adult seals. That would be the way to start reducing the population.
We are going to have to start with the adult seals, but not just slaughter of the adult seals for the sake of it. What we need is a plan of how we would use that product for the betterment of the people in the country and the world. Of course the hon. member for Bonavista—Trinity—Conception has said on numerous occasions that there is a way to do that and a way to use it. It is new technology. The meat is processed and used in a capsule form for people who need a supplement. It is a supplement that could be used for people all over the world, for children who are starving. We give all kinds of foreign aid to poor African nations. We send all kinds of money and food over there. This could be used as a supplement. We have the resource. All we need to do is use the money for technology and develop it so we could make a product to send overseas that would help people with regard to the powdered form, the protein.
However, we did not do that. I do not think we will ever do that because people do not want to do it for some reason or another. These are the things that we should be doing. We are sending all kinds of money over there, so why not send a supplement that could be in a powder form? The hon. member from Newfoundland and Labrador has talked about this several times. Memorial University in our province has the ability to do it, from what I understand.
But we do not want to do what is right. We either want to do things for political reasons, or because of foreign overfishing we do not want to tackle the true problem.
As a result of that, we are more concerned with neighbouring countries than with worrying about our own people in our own country. What we need to do is one of the other things that was forgotten, which was unfortunate. When the minister closed the fishery he never looked at early retirement packages, he never looked at extension of EI for plant workers at the present time, and he did not look at licence buyouts. There are so many more options, and if they had sat down and listened they would have done a better job.
Of course we are here now trying to get the minister to listen to some common sense. Hopefully he will take what has been said in the House tonight and put some of it back into an action plan. At least now we can say he has listened. When he gave his speech tonight I know that a lot of MPs from Newfoundland and Labrador were actually shocked to hear that it is a done deal, that he does not want to talk about it anymore, that it is a done deal. But the done deal is not done until the people themselves say it is done.
Right now I firmly believe that there is enough support in the House to make sure that the minister does listen. That is all we are asking him to do: to listen, to revisit it and to do what is right for the people. I know he is in a hard situation, but we have to do what is right for the people, and that is not closing down the fishery. He should have listened to the all party committee report because we are the ones who put our necks on the line. He could have done what was right because we gave him the idea. We gave him the right thing to do for our province, the province we live in, the province we represent, the people we see every day.
We have seven MPs from Newfoundland and Labrador, and as far as I am concerned we have no political agenda like Captain Canada, Captain Wimp, had. We have seven MPs representing people in Canada, people in Newfoundland and Labrador, and our job is to make sure that our people get the best deal possible for themselves and the federal government gets the best deal that it can give. Right now the government does not have a total plan. It has a plan that is going to be there for 18 months. Where do we go after 18 months? I do not even know if the government knows.
Only recently a lady said to me, “Rex, I don't know what I am going to do”. I said, “I do not think the federal government knows either, so let's sit back and see what we can figure out, see what the total plan will be”. She started adding up the costs for her husband to get ready for fishing and she said, “With the cod gone, I do not know if we can afford to make our payments at the bank anymore”. The cod used to give them enough to make a living, not a large living but just a living to get them on the low scale for EI for the winter. As a result of this plan, she does not know where she is going.
Another gentlemen told me, “They have taken my life away”. I said, “They will only take your life away if you let them take it away from you. We need to stand firm. We need to stand strong and we need to send a message to the federal government that we are not taking it. We are going to fight”.
And if it means that we are going to have to block highways, as they have already done in Newfoundland and Labrador, if they have to come to Ottawa and make sure that the government gets the message, the government is going to have to listen, because the people are not going to take it anymore. As it is, they are hurting today. They are not going to take it sitting down anymore. They are going to fight back like they have never fought before.
I had a meeting in St. John's after I was elected. There is a plan. I firmly believe this and a lot of people I talked to firmly believe this too. This was not mentioned tonight. There is a plan. The federal government is like a snake in the grass; it is very slimy about it because it has a plan but it is not telling anyone about it. The plan is to get rid of non-core fishermen in the province because it was not done in 1991-92 right up to the year 2000.
The first closure was supposed to get rid of people in the fishery but it did not happen. As a result, the majority of the people who are going to be adversely affected from the closure of the cod are people in Newfoundland and Labrador who are classified as non-core. Non-core fishermen are basically fishermen who hold a groundfish licence, probably for lumpfish, lobster and cod. If we take cod away from them, they will not survive because that is the only fish item that managed to get them their EI.
The core fishermen are going to hurt as well but the core fishermen are not going to hurt as badly as the non-core. Of course the plant workers depend on the cod to come ashore from the core fishermen and the non-core are not going to have work. They are going to be adversely affected.
There is one group no one ever mentions and that is the businesses which depend on fishermen to sell their product, to spend their money and basically to depend on people to continue to spend money in their communities. Businesses are going to be adversely affected. Businesses in small communities are going to be forced to close because of it.
It has been said tonight that Joey Smallwood resettled people. If that is what the government is looking at, to make life so miserable in rural Newfoundland and Labrador that it will force people away from their normal style of living--