Madam Speaker, I rise today to table a petition that is signed by hundreds of folks in British Columbia on what has happened with the collapse of the sockeye salmon run.
History teaches us many lessons and one would think the government and the folks in the Department of Fisheries and Oceans would have learned from the collapse of the cod fishery in Atlantic Canada. If we are doomed to repeat our failures of the past, we will not fix the fisheries industry. It seems to me that we have failed both the east coast and now we have failed the west coast when it comes to the fisheries.
We need, and the petitioners say this, an independent judicial inquiry under the federal Inquiries Act to find out what went wrong. Clearly we did not learn any lessons from before. We tell our children that we should always learn the lessons of the past, but we have not done this. Clearly we need help to get it done.
Let us get on with it, call the inquiry and ensure this does not happen again.