Mr. Speaker, before I answer the last question, let me pick up on what the member was saying. He is a member of our standing committee and knows full well some of the serious issues we have taken up.
In fact, over the last four years that I have been on the committee, we has undertaken some major studies. I would suggest that there are issues being dealt with today which would never have surfaced if our standing committee had not done a great job. We have been able to do it because we have been strictly non-partisan. At our committee meetings it is very difficult to tell who represents which party. That is the way it should be; perhaps that is the way it should be here in the House.
One of the issues we dealt with certainly was the major report on the Fraser River. We have done it with infrastructure. We did a great report on overfishing. This coming fall we will be starting to ask the question of what happened to the northern cod and why it has not come back after 12 years. I hope we never get to the day when we are asking where the Fraser sockeye have gone and why they have not come back after x number of years. The committee does a good job.
In relation to Mr. Williams' report, I really cannot answer, because I do not know Mr. Williams. I have never met him. I do know that a lot of concern was expressed, not because of Mr. Williams but because of the way the department operates. Quite often it tries to sneak in some kind of activity to try to cover up for its inadequacies, and it appeared the government was picking someone who would probably tell it what it wanted to hear. It might have tried that with Justice Gomery and it was wrong there also.
I will be the first to admit that Justice Williams picked a very good representative group of people to be on his committee. Originally there was talk about bringing in everybody involved, over 30 people, to the committee, but no one thought that would work properly. He put together a concise committee of people heavily involved in the fishery, all of whom were stakeholders, many of whom also had concerns about how well the committee would operate, and they did a very good report.
I would say to the member that it was no better than our own, maybe not as pointed but a very good report, because we were dealing with the same topic and talking to the same people. One of the reasons our committee tabled its report before Justice Williams' report was so the minister could easily see that this was all legitimate.
The bottom line is that two good reports were done. It is the response that concerns us.