Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my learned colleague for this question. He certainly is very knowledgeable on this issue. He has lived it, not only in his district of Malpeque, Prince Edward Island, but also as a former chair of the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Ocean, which has spent quite a bit of time studying this issue.
He raises some good points, but I think he does agree with me that from a global context, although everything is not perfect and this implementation has not been perfect, by and large the whole implementation of the Marshall initiative by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has worked reasonably well. It is not perfect.
The hon. member raised one point about the whole issue of aboriginal persons on the water. Again, that is one of the programs on which I just reported about seven minutes ago. The minister announced last year that the department is trying to upgrade the skills and training of the aboriginal fishers so that they will better trained in the whole process of fishing. My colleague knows that we cannot take what we call a landlubber and put him at sea or the next thing we know we are going to have problems. People may think that fishing is easy. It is not an easy occupation. It is a hard occupation and it is a dangerous occupation, and one has to be trained to do it.
What has happened on the east coast is that a lot of fishing families have been at it for eight generations. A lot of the Acadian families started in the 1600s, so for them it has been 10 and 12 generations. A lot of these men--although a lot of women go to sea now--were trained by their fathers. A lot of them started as young men and have learned their training at sea. Again, that is the program the minister announced and it has been a good program.
He identifies in his comments the whole issue of the acquisition of licences, and the learned member is correct that the department, to meet its requirement under the Marshall initiative, is supposed to get two additional licences on the north shore of Prince Edward Island. The department has tried its very best but one of the problems, because of the acquisition by DFO of a number of these licences over the last number of years, and perhaps because fishing has been relatively good--although there are parts of Prince Edward Island where the lobster fishery, especially on the strait side, has not been good, but in the district that I call LF24 it has been relatively good--is that it has driven up the price of these licences pretty high, as my learned friend knows very well, and that has caused problems in acquiring these last two licences.
My learned friend is right. It would be better to have them spread out across the north shore. Hopefully that will take place.