Mr. Chair, someone needs to explain why lobster buyers reduced buying or stopped buying altogether, or why the shrimp industry is now shut down in Newfoundland. If access to credit is so readily available, that would be a very good question that a fishermen from eastern Canada would love to have answered.
However, I will now quote the minister who said that Canada has now “assumed custodial management of the fishery in the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO) regulatory area”. However, members of this chamber know the truth. If Canada has custodial management of the nose and the tail of the Grand Banks, why is the European Union continuing to rape cod stocks by overfishing millions of pounds of cod as bycatch? This was a fact that was acknowledged by her own government in a memorandum to NAFO from Canada, which I hold in my hand.
Does the minister really believe that Canada has custodial management in her hands, in the hands of her platform, or is that just another piece of Conservative rhetoric?