Madam Speaker, my question tonight is further to the question I asked regarding Sable Island.
The government has been quite schizophrenic in its handling of Sable Island. The costs of maintaining a human presence on Sable Island are not large but the benefits are huge.
There has been human habitation on Sable Island since 1802, who were originally from the colony of Nova Scotia. Since Confederation the federal government has retained that mandate. However in the 1990s it offloaded it, which is part of the reason that I call this a schizophrenic arrangement.
The government offloaded its responsibility and succeeded offloading it on to a preservation trust. This arrangement was failing because of the funding partners and so it offloaded part of the funding on to industry and so on. This whole arrangement was falling apart and as of March 31 nobody was going to be left on the island.
The official opposition started to ask questions and generate media attention. We got the government's attention to do something to correct the situation, rather than continuing the dithering it had been doing for a great many years.
Sable Island cannot be treated like a rental car. It is a core asset and one that needs authorization to establish a presence there in order to maintain our sovereignty and derive the benefits that will come with it.
I had the opportunity a couple of weeks ago to attend a presentation by Zoe Larsen from the Ecology Action Network at the Museum of Nature in Ottawa. She has spent 30 years researching Sable Island. The institutional memory and the stewardship that was displayed in her presentation was amazing.
We need a long term, sustainable commitment to this place. It extends Canada's economic zone outward for hundreds of kilometres. It also extends our reach for search and rescue operations, for the military, et cetera. Sable Island is vitally important.
There is a long identified problem of multiple federal departments benefiting from the station, yet the costs being borne disproportionately by DFO, which is why we had the offloading situation. The Ministers of the Environment and Fisheries and Oceans finally made an announcement on January 31 saying that the government was committed to maintaining a human presence but that it was still leaving us with a shortfall in funding, which it was going to put in place for the next year or two while it revisited some other options.
My questions are simple. As there is no authorization by statute to guarantee a human presence on the island, when can we expect that? Two departments are covering the funding in the short term but a long term arrangement is needed. When can we expect that? All the government's arrangements to date have been quite myopic. I would like an expansion on the original answer to this question.