Mr. Speaker, we have just watched the member for Yukon, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Natural Resources, dance around and skirt the salient issue here. I think the member must have missed the point completely. The Minister of Fisheries has been unilaterally and arbitrarily putting conditions on licences when he had no statutory authority to do so. He has been doing it for years. It makes one wonder who is driving the bus around here. Who is minding the store in the Department of Fisheries if this kind of irregularity has been the norm for years. It was up to the Joint Standing Committee on Scrutiny of Regulations to catch the irregularity. That is the real story of the day.
My colleague has a nice yarn and it was kind of a soothing, melodic flow to the diatribe he shared with us, but it had nothing to do with what is fundamentally wrong with the Department of Fisheries as managed by the Minister of Fisheries. He has been unilaterally and arbitrarily setting the conditions of licences for the fisheries in Ontario with no statutory authority whatsoever until we pass this bill to do so.
How my colleague can explain that irregularity? In the larger context, how can he explain this pattern, trend and obsession of the Liberals to grant even more unilateral authority to ministers in virtually every piece of legislation they have introduced since I have been a member of Parliament for eight years? It is a trademark motif of the Liberals to take power away from Parliament, to bastardize democracy, to minimize our participation and control of our legislation and to shift that authority incrementally, bit by bit, to ministers, giving absolute power to them.
Maybe the member for Yukon in a little more honest way could give us a response to those legitimate concerns that we are trying to address here tonight.