Oh, Mr. Speaker, where to begin? I have some respect for my colleague from Nanaimo—Alberni, who mentioned paying some attention to my comments. I will ask him to pay a little more to my next piece, because the fearmongering he speaks of presents a notion that there is some imminent doom to be presented to the fishing communities in my region.
I would suggest that he come to visit with me in the regions and communities of mine that have upwards of 85% and 90% unemployment and then talk to me about fearmongering. How dare he talk to me about fearmongering when I have community after community watching the steady and rapid decline of their fish stocks, in part due to the mismanagement not just of this government, but of those that have gone before?
One of the reasons that this mismanagement has been so consistent is that government comes to the point of changing law. Are we for an update? Are we for a revision of the Fisheries Act? Of course we are. Are we for this revision? Absolutely not.
Those communities have greater fear because they see the department act without intelligence, and I mean both the intelligence of the mind and the intelligence in terms of information as to what people are desperately seeking, which is some sense of influence and control over the resource that their livelihoods and communities depend upon.
To suggest that it is fearmongering, when the communities that I represent are consistently shut out of those consultations, is ridiculous. To suggest that, when I implore the government to listen to the communities and then take that listening and that intelligence and place it into the bills, which the government simply has not done in this case, I am reminded deeply of this Conservative government's first and clumsy attempts at getting environmental legislation correct. The Conservatives went internally to their own advisers, with three lines in their party platform about the environment, and thought that they knew enough to actually construct a sound environmental policy.
Lo and behold, they marched it out into the lobby, to the media and the waiting public, and dropped a dud that paid little attention to absolutely no attention to the details required to make sound environmental policy. So from this corner we negotiated to take that bill to committee prior to second reading, prior to agreeing to it in principle, which is the essence of this conversation, the agreeing and chucking this off to committee. When that is done we accept the principle of the bill, but when a bill is so deeply flawed as this one that the principle is wrong, that is not responsible.
It is not responsible for elected members who represent fishing communities to send a bill that they know is wrong in principle to a committee for some tweaking, some additions and some minor adjustments. It is not on. That is not salient. It is not responsible.
Of course there have been talks about fisheries renewal. That talk has gone on for longer than seven years, I would contest, but when it comes to the action, to the delivery, it was 12 hours after the government actually released its first initial new fisheries act that our dear friend Byng Giraud proclaimed a welcome, under the British Columbia mining industry, to the new 200 page-plus act. He was ready to go in 12 hours. I suppose he read the whole thing. Then we found out that he is also a senior consultant in British Columbia in the Earnscliffe Strategy Group and currently sits on the governing national council of the Conservative Party of Canada.
It is fascinating that the validation popped out from a party insider. What an incredible source of validation for a bill that is so important to the communities we all represent and should have been validated by the communities we represent, not by somebody else with different interests.