Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the comments by the member for Winnipeg Centre, but I think he has me confused with another member. I was not a fisherman in my previous life. I think he is confusing me with the member for Delta—Richmond East.
I do come from a resource background. I was a forester. I worked in the woods and with fisheries personnel as a consequence. I lived in coastal communities and overlapped many times at the local level with the commercial and recreational fishing sectors and of course participated in all of that.
The whole question of what we know about our fisheries resource I found very interesting, because indeed, what we do not know about so many biological things is amazing. I have a somewhat biological background. My father had a biological background. One of my brothers is a carpenter, like the member, and the other one is a geneticist. The geneticist deals with biological things too. It is just amazing what we do not know.
One of the things that the biological station in Nanaimo did determine is how long some of these groundfish live. Some of the ages are absolutely incredible, well beyond what anybody comprehended. That affects the rate at which we want to harvest them, because we want to make sure we have a sustainable resource. If these mature fish are 10 years old, maybe one-tenth could be taken on an annual basis, but if they are 50 years old that is a whole different ball game. In some cases, that is what the station staff were finding out.
In terms of the member's environmental question, I think that is an important question. There are several long since abandoned mines in British Columbia. There is one in my constituency, but there are others on the coast and in the province that are continuing to create acid runoff, which is putting heavy metals and other things into the rivers. This has created a situation that has basically sterilized some river systems. The most well known example is at Britannia on the way up to Squamish and Whistler from Vancouver. One can see the bottom of that river course.
Some of them actually would not be all that expensive to fix, but the original mining ventures are long since gone. The federal government is saying that they are not its responsibility and the province is saying the same and nothing happens. I think we need to change that approach. Surely to God if something is killing the fisheries resource there should be some joint federal-provincial way to deal with those sites, especially when we can prove there is a cost effective way to do it.