Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to the subamendment to Bill C-52. I have enjoyed the debate in a way that I have not enjoyed some other debates recently. Whenever we start talking about fish, people's emotions very often come into it. Even though we have had some people with a background in the legal fraternity who have become quite involved in the debate tonight, I find it very satisfying to be sitting between two people with a legal background and two away from our fisheries critic from Newfoundland and Labrador. Being from British Columbia, I have a riding with a very strong fisheries component and influence.
This has been a great debate. We have learned quite a bit. One thing we have learned is that the government in this legislation specifically is trying to put a very bad patch on a flat tire. If it succeeds in what it is attempting to do, it only will have a blow out again. This is not the way to create a regime where we ask people to enforce a licence, to fine people or put them in jail on the basis of no statutory authority and we do it by declaring that the words in the bill do not constitute part of the Statutory Instruments Act.
This is the worst kind of an ad hoc emergency, short term, evasive, unprincipled way to approach this issue. Unfortunately, this has become a philosophical way of life for some of the senior management at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. It exhibits itself in the way they manage the department.
If we go to the crux of the issue, it is all about enforcement of the fishery. How do we enforce the fishery? Presumably we do it through the act and then we do it through regulation. Administratively, we do it through the licence process.
We know the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has been remiss in its enforcement of areas where it has a very clear responsibility and authority. I will only talk about British Columbia because that is what I know the best for the purposes of example.
We had a Fraser River sockeye fishery that was being prosecuted by people, with no enforcement being carried on portions of the river. That was a deliberate decision by some people in the bureaucracy. There was no political will to give it what they really needed, which was police backup because of the fact that it felt threatened. This is all a matter of public record. We know that enforcement did not occur. This contributed in a major way to the collapse of that fishery.
While that very lack of enforcement was happening, we had enforcement officers in Johnson Strait boarding boats and fining them because they did not have the log filled out for that day. This is the kind of lack of appropriate priority setting that we see over and over from the department. This comes from a department which controls virtually every aspect of the livelihood of the commercial sector of the fishery.
That direct control requires parliamentary scrutiny and parliamentary approval if we are going to avoid the pitfalls of having the bureaucracy or junior officials carry out vendettas. It would put recipients of licences at the mercy of some entity that is not palatable. This already happens to some extent and is very problematical. There are no end of things that could be scrutinized in the system.
Recently, a fisherman who had been part of developing a new fishery, what is called an emerging fishery. Because he had been partaking in the experimental end of it, everything on the form that he filled out to indicate that he was eligible for a licence in this new regime of licensing, everything pointed to him being eligible. An employee of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans accepted the fee and it was only several weeks later that the applicant learned that there had been a judgment that the boat did not have a certain kind of licence in a certain timeframe and therefore did not qualify. That was based on the way the form was filled out and not the actuality. The judgment was that the form was controlling everything despite the fact that when the form was accepted, it all looked okay.
Here is an individual who is now not licensed in a fishery he helped develop through no fault of his own. One would assume that there would be a fairness test and an appeal, and that this would be a very easy thing to overcome. It just so happens that an emerging fishery is not eligible for appeal to a tribunal. The rules are not clear that there is any appeal and so presumably it could be ruled either way that there is an appeal or there is not an appeal.
I have certainly made my representations and to date it has been quite a few weeks without a response. In the meantime, time marches on and fishing seasons come and go, so this is probably becoming an academic question. These questions are not academic when somebody's livelihood is at stake. Over and over again, every aspect of fisheries policies, fisheries regulations, and fisheries licensing has everything to do with whether a person is able to make a living or not in the commercial sector.
We must ensure that what we are doing is appropriate and in the long term interests of the fishery, not just to ensure that our commercial harvesters are treated appropriately but to ensure that conservation and every other aspect of the fishery is being considered under a system that is open to scrutiny and has parliamentary oversight when appropriate.
We have had a real problem with the priorities of the fisheries department. We have witnessed the collapse of the Fraser River fishery and this was not the first time for the sockeye runs. We have seen places like Smith Inlet where we have had runs decimated. There is no longer any real attempt to even monitor what is truly going up the rivers and what is happening there. It was a major salmon resource in the mid-coast of British Columbia that for a generation or more has now been largely left to its own devices and abandoned, and it is not doing well at all.
We have seen extinctions of runs with no explanation. We have seen a lack of commitment from this administration on what really gets many people involved in the fishery which is salmon enhancement and our whole approach to habitat improvement and our hatchery system.
We have had over a $4 million cut to that program in British Columbia and Yukon. This is a program that enlists thousands of volunteers. I am not sure what the latest number is but I read that it is in the tens of thousands of people who volunteer their time on the west coast of Canada to do work in this area. A small program that has not risen in cost to the government is now being cut back because of so-called overspending some years ago, making many people very unhappy. There has never been a satisfactory explanation.
We know that the fisheries department is now divided between those who support these expenditures and those who are trying to grab part of that budget for their own because they are so stretched for funds. The sharp pencils in Ottawa are quite happy to let that game play itself out because in the meantime they are controlling the agenda. We have a situation where the public expectation of what the department should be doing and could be doing is quite different from the reality.
What happened in this latest round on the Fraser River is a perfect example. The fisheries office in the Fraser Valley was responsible for much of the enforcement in that area, but it was not happening. The people in the Fraser Valley were not hoodwinked in any way. They knew that the department lost its will, its ability or desire to enforce the rules on the Fraser River, and so they were not under any misunderstanding at all. That is consistent with the sort of elusive and ad hoc, unprincipled approach that the department was taking as to how it conducted business.
I started off by talking about the importance of this whole enforcement regime. The government can change the words. It is only trying to put a patch on a flat tire, but it is also trying to find a way to make its enforcement band-aid even easier from an academic, theoretical standpoint. It all means nothing if one is not prepared to do any of the enforcement.
We had cuts to the number of enforcement people on the west coast and we had a huge move to put enforcement people in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. That was several years ago. We are now at the point where that experiment turned out to be a bad idea. They really frustrated landowners in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba with this overzealous behaviour that rocked generations-old practices, carried out a whole bunch of counterproductive things, and attacked the basic premise that people who own private property had some say over how they were going to cultivate their land and so on.
Now we have the government retrenching those very people who they shipped out, but it is not translating itself into an improvement on enforcement efforts on the coast. We are still not getting the resources. This essentially means that once again what many view as a priority activity of government becomes an activity of government that government sees as non-essential and one that it can easily and largely dispose of, so this is not a happy time.
We have first level fisheries personnel who deeply care about the resource. They involve themselves in the community. They involve themselves with the people who are users of the resource. They provide an interface with the public and they are not governed by a clock. They deeply care about the resource.
We have members of the public in the very same category. I talked about the thousands of people who volunteer. We have school children with a deep appreciation of the wonders of the fisheries resource. They take school days, and go out and see what is going on. We have rural communities with a deep attachment and sometimes this is very much an economic question as well.
We have some of our coastal communities that have become quite dependent on the commercial recreational sector that occurs in the summer time. Those communities are feeling quite vulnerable to the actions of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans as well because if they choose to suddenly cut the activities of the local hatchery, this can have a devastating effect.
We have deep concerns being expressed by all of the communities on northern Vancouver Island within my riding regarding the behaviour of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
This has also been expressed through the aboriginal fishing groups in my riding, sometimes as an association. Sometimes on a personal level I have been approached. It is easier for them to talk to me; I can be the bearer rather than them.
What we have with this bill is a political and bureaucratic situation that is a failure of the public interest. I welcome any questions.