Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to be a part of this debate. The encouraging presence of many members in the House is admirable and shows the passion that arises from this important debate.
I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Nanaimo—Cowichan.
It is most remarkable to hear the Liberal government members talking about their admiration and respect for the DFO frontline workers and what excellent quality of science is being performed in the field. It is remarkable in the sense that there are 1,600 supposedly very fine people working here in Ottawa.
While I suppose the Ottawa River is a very important river and the fish stocks in it are very important, we on the west coast find it rather strange and perturbing that the DFO consistently finds the funds available to make sure that the staffing requirements here in Ottawa are exceptional, while it also finds room in its budget to cut 55 seasonal workers on the west coast. These are the same seasonal workers, who they find of such excellent calibre, who simply do not have the resources to really understand what is happening in the water. They say that fish swim deep and that they are very hard to count. I find this excuse specious, with no pun intended.
We are talking about a judicial inquiry at this point. The government has come forward with the excellent notion of setting up its own committee, appointing certain members and telling us not to worry about any patronage appointments because the committee will be unbiased and very clear and prescient in its arguments.
What we find difficult in the far stretches of the Skeena—Bulkley Valley in the northwest of British Columbia is that we have had these reports and these studies. I would suggest that we could almost fill this chamber with the number of studies on what is wrong with particular aspects of the DFO.
Now we stand in support of the motion that has come forward today from the Conservative Party but with a couple of cautions, which we presented and I will present again. With all of the studies available and all that we know is wrong with particular aspects of the DFO, we still have a ministry operating in such a way that the fish are depleting, with several million of them missing this year. It is blamed on the fact that it was a warm season or even that the waters might have been a touch low.
It is funny that in 1992 and 1994, in all seasons that we find these stocks off, the DFO is very quick to find another reason why it is not its fault. The government finds a reason to suggest that it is others, such as the first nations, or the gillnetters, or the Alaskans.
What this inquiry needs to look into is what is wrong with DFO as an agency. When we have an agency that is meant to protect fish, that is meant to protect the communities that rely upon these fish for food source, for ceremony, for commercial use, how can our fish be under such threat.
The lack of credibility has become so fundamental in the communities that I represent that to put a DFO sticker on one's car is to take one's life into one's own hands in my riding. The animosity and lack of fundamental respect for this agency has come to such a point that the credibility is lost. The agency no longer holds the position of an honest broker. It no longer holds the position of an agency that is able to defend the interests of those communities, to defend the interests of those fish that the hon. member mentioned before.
For example, this past summer a crabfest was held in a very small Nisga'a community in the Nass Valley in northwestern B.C. Residents notified officials at DFO several months before that they would be selling crabs. Everything was kosher until the moment of the day. I arrived just after officials from DFO had arrived in their large trucks wearing flak jackets, carrying large weapons and ready to bust the place up. They told everyone that they had to shut down immediately. They went after grandmothers and grandfathers who were selling these fish and told them they had to stop and that they were shutting the place down, batons in hand.
This is a community of 200 people on the far north coast of British Columbia. We had grandmothers in tears and grandfathers furious and ready to get their shotguns. This was an attitude brought forward by the department, completely disjointed from the local community. The department completely misunderstood and misrepresented the interests of this country and failed to represent the interests of that local community.
The department needs to go through this review because it has lost its way. We have the reports and the studies. We know the department has screwed up on the east coast. If we are looking to replicate DFO's performance on the east coast fishery on the west coast, I, and I hope every member in this House, will stand in the way of that action. What we have seen on the east coast is community after community dying because the fish have not been managed well.
I think it is wrong for anyone to suggest that we should simply sit back and trust a Liberal appointed committee to go through the processes, to look at DFO and to come up with a list of recommendations that we know full well will be ignored, and that the fishery will then rest in the hands of DFO, and we should not worry about it. I represent communities that rely heavily on these fish stocks.
For the last three months I have listened over and over again to the Gomery inquiry and to the revelations that have been coming out. While the government refuses to comment until it is over, what I have learned is that what we heard prior to the election being called was not all that the House needed to hear, that witnesses were not entirely forthcoming in the panel that was presented. The inquiry has allowed us to look further into the sponsorship scandal which pales in comparison to the travesty and the scandal that is happening within our fisheries and oceans.
If we lost $100 million through the sponsorship program, then we are losing tens and hundreds of millions of dollars more through a fishery that has the potential of collapsing under DFO mismanagement.
What is the problem with DFO? Some concerns have been expressed in the House that this will become a witch hunt against first nations. This is a concern that I must express forcefully to the members promoting this motion. We need to look at this situation from the view of all the players who are involved in the fisheries on the west coast on the Fraser River.
We in the north look at the Fraser as a canary in the mine and that river is in trouble. The Skeena, the Stikine, all of the rivers in the northwest face similar difficulty. If I were to go back to my constituents and tell them not to worry, to relax because DFO has it under control, I would never be able to keep a straight face. I also would never survive at any town meeting if I were to make such a suggestion. The people in my riding have had those face to face interactions with DFO. They realize that, while there are many competent frontline officers, when decisions head up the pipe to the 1,600 people working in Ottawa, they get skewed around and politicized and we would have what happened on the east coast. People do not trust this department in a fundamental way.
I mentioned the first nations that I am dealing with in the northwest of my riding right now who have talked to DFO. DFO made its initial assessment of the area and said that since there were no fish bearing streams in the area that it would allow the 160 kilometre road for the mining project to go ahead. The first nations then brought in their own fish biologists and stood over the streams as the fish came up spawning. It is either a lack of will, a lack of intelligence or human power on the ground on the part of DFO to not simply recognize what a salmon looks like when it is going up a stream. To suddenly be issuing certificates or to be considering issuing certificates for such projects, shows that the consultation process that DFO now has is not working.
On the lastest trip to Vancouver, which I happened to be on, we heard that the commercial, sport and native fishers who are on the river 200 to 220 days of the year have no credibility with the department. The department does not seem to think that they have any viability or that their arguments make any sense and it needs to rely on the 6, 7, 8, 10 officers that it has on the entire Fraser River.
It is a complete joke if the DFO actually expects those few people on the ground to understand. There is a fundamental understanding that DFO does not get. People who work on the river every day, rely on the river and live by the river need to be consulted and the consultation needs to be acted upon, not simply paid lip service to.
The Cultis Lake and Sakinaw salmon are now at the point of extinction. We heard from many interest groups that said that we cannot allow this to happen and others who said that it would harm too much of the fishery. I stayed silent on that. I wanted the House to understand in that moment that the federal government was making a decision that would allow species to become extinct due to the mismanagement of the agency.
Here we are at the end of the pipe saying that we are in a crisis and that we simply cannot do anything about it because it will threaten the industry. The decisions had to be made months and years prior to not end up at the point where we are losing entire species of fish. We were forced between the industries that needed to be able to fish and two species that are now sentenced to extinction.
Some weeks ago I asked officials at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans how much we were spending on fish farms in B.C. It is a simple question. I just wanted to know the dollar figure. I am still waiting on the answer.
If this was a parliamentarian asking this question in committee and this was the response time from department officials, I only hesitate to think how long it takes them to answer to communities' interests and concerns.
While the DFO promotes wild salmon stocks, supposedly, it is also promoting fish farms which threaten those stocks.