Mr. Speaker, I notice we are rapidly running out of time. I am thinking about the people who have tuned into us all night, having missed a very good baseball game with Halliday pitching and missing Duffy's countdown. Perhaps we could have Duffy do a countdown on useless regulations that governments try to introduce.
I hesitated to get up because I thought some of the Liberal members would stand to defend their minister and what he was trying to do in this scenario, particularly when we have such knowledgeable fisherpersons like the members for Whitby—Oshawa and Saint Boniface. The chair of the finance committee might want some comic relief by participating in this debate in order to come down from the evening he had earlier. That is not the case so we will have to finish up with a few remarks.
The member for Winnipeg Centre said earlier that what the minister was trying to do was put conditions on licences with no statutory authority to do so. That is exactly what the minister is trying to do. The government was trying to pull a fast one and got caught.
This is not the situation that occurred last week when we suddenly had to rush a two clause bill out to the members with absolutely no background or explanatory notes. It was only upon a hurried request from members asking what it was all about that a briefing was given. Then we were told that it was absolutely nothing, that it was to correct a problem in the Ontario regulations to ensure that everything flowed properly.
On investigation, we found that was a long ways from the truth. This is only a two clause bill, but the ramifications of this will echo from coast to coast to coast. It gives the minister, as the member for Winnipeg Centre said, carte blanche to impose upon people involved in the fishery fines up to half a million dollars and jail time up to two years less a day, which he does not have the authority to do at present.
One of the things that has happened, in this cloud of confusion the government tried to create and the hoax it tried to pull on its counterparts in Ontario, is the minister seems to have vanished from the scene and left this to float, hoping it will go away. It has been around for a long time. It was not introduced last week when all the flurry happened. The bill has been on the go for 18 years. It was 1987 when this regulation first got the notice of people in Parliament.
On at least two occasions since then, bills have been introduced to try to correct this measure. One did not get beyond first reading and the other died when Parliament died. First, the government must not think it was very important or the majority of the members in the House did not think it was important to make this correction.
Right out of the blue, at the last minute because of pressure put on by the Standing Joint Committee on the Scrutiny of Regulations, the minister tries to make blanket changes without giving the facts involved. That is what I think upset most people in the House. If this had gone through unnoticed, every person involved in the fishery in would be in a much more tedious position than he or she finds himself or herself in at present.
Regulations always have to be reviewed, updated and changed, but they have to be done properly. The rule of law can never be overlooked in this honoured hall of operations, but this is what is being done here. The rule of law has been pushed aside and the minister, for his own sake, is trying to ram through a bill which certainly will be more detrimental than any effect of not doing it.
We wonder sometimes why the minister is not as concerned about other regulations. Why is the minister not concerned about overfishing regulations? We hear all kinds of platitudes. We do not see any action.
Why is he not concerned about the rules and regulations that surround quotas? That is a major one. As we speak here in the House about a regulation which should never have been brought to this place, back in the House of Assembly in Newfoundland tomorrow, and today for those watching back home, a debate will continue on the future of Harbour Breton, tied in with the future, perhaps, of Fishery Products International.
It is a very serious debate, a debate that has gone on for two full days, a debate in which the government will play a very important role, because the result will be determined on a large scale by what the government is going to do to assist people in Harbour Breton who have been put out of work by the closure of their fish plant.
The fish plant closed simply because the company that operated it, Fishery Products International, says it does not have product enough to operate all its plants so some have to go. Harbour Breton was the first on the chopping block.
The big question is, what do we have in the ocean in relation to quotas that could be made available to companies or to areas, whatever the case might be? Let us just say we mean quotas which could be caught by people involved in the fishery to be brought ashore and processed by people involved in the processing end. The answer to that is simply that we do not know because there have been such great cuts in science that we have no idea, really, of what is available.
The set-up of the department, the regulations under which the department operates, basically gives large companies carte blanche to do what they want with a resource that we are told clearly by the minister, by government, is a resource belonging to the people. I have asked the question directly to the minister. Others have also. Who owns the fish in the ocean? The answer always given is, “The people of Canada own the fish. It is managed on their behalf by the minister and the Department of Fisheries”.
I have been here five years. I have seen four different ministers of fisheries and I can say it does not give me any great consolation to know that these people are the custodians of our resource, because we have seen it completely and utterly mismanaged. We have seen it abused. We have seen it destroyed by foreigners and by our own people. We have seen it used for everything except what it is supposed to be used for, that is, the benefit of the people.
We are a country rich in resources, whether it be our fishery, minerals, water power, forestry, farming or tourism. We can go on and on. It is a country that is extremely rich. When we look at the small population of our country and the abundant resources, and when we realize that the economy basically is developed upon the development of these resources, why are all of us not very rich?
Why is every person who wants to work in the country not working? Because the “custodians” or the managers of our resources have not done a very good job in managing them. If only we knew what is available in the ocean and what is capable of being harvested.
If we knew when to harvest that resource and under what conditions the resource could be harvested, just imagine how much product could be brought into the various processing facilities around the country. Just imagine if we could eliminate the waste, catching the undersized, and the abuse in the fishery, the people of places like Harbour Breton would not be wondering about the future of their fish plant because they would not have time to worry. They would do what they did some years ago. They would be working round the clock.
The plant in Harbour Breton, by the way, just a few years ago was processing 30 million pounds of fish a year. At that time the value was roughly $20 million. That was one small fish processing plant in one small rural community. We can imagine the contribution to the area, to the province and eventually to the country.