Mr. Speaker, as I was saying, I asked the Prime Minister why he had gone back on his commitment to deal with the overfishing issue off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, particularly on the nose and tail of the Grand Banks and the Flemish Cap.
During the election, the Prime Minister made a commitment to deal with the overfishing “even if it meant taking custodial management”. When I asked why he and the government had done nothing since, the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans replied, “Our process that we are using is working. We have had 130 boardings this year. There are fewer boats out there and we are finding fewer discrepancies”.
The average person might buy that, and even statistics to a point at this time of the year might prove that statement true, but overall it is not the case.
If we go back just a couple of months before the election, the same minister was up telling us that we had increased our activity out there, that we had put out more patrols, that we had done more boarding and found more blatant abuses and that we had to do something about it.
The Liberals cannot have it both ways. They have already admitted that they found more abuses. If there are fewer abuses it has only been recently, since the election, and I will tell the House why. First, they are looking for an excuse to back off on the commitment. Second, this time of the year the allocated quotas have been caught. Most of the boats have returned to their own nations or have gone fishing somewhere else. In the case of the Spanish and Portuguese, they are off the coasts of Australia, Africa, or wherever because they travel the world using vacuum cleaners to scoop up everything that swims in the ocean.
The minister is not being factual when he states that this problem is correcting itself. It is not. It is the time of year when we would expect less activity in this area and, consequently, fewer abuses. The problem is that the government has done absolutely nothing to deal with this serious situation.
The parliamentary secretary, undoubtedly, will be answering for the minister who should be answering for himself, who in turn answers for the Prime Minister who should be answering because he was the one who committed to deal with the issue. The parliamentary secretary will tell us that they have had so many boardings with fewer abuses. As I say, statistics can be used any way one wants to use them, and, in this case, all he is doing is taking the time of year when there is less activity and consequently fewer abuses to rules and regulations.
However the issue has not been corrected. The only way to deal with this is for the government to take a strong stand in making sure that the rules and regulations are adhered to, that the quotas allocated by NAFO are fished but not overfished and that species under moratoria are protected. This can be done in two ways: by the government doing it itself, or by showing some leadership within the international organizations to get others to work with us for that benefit.
I look forward with interest to the parliamentary secretary's answer.