Madam Chair, it is even worse than that. It is not even that the government is abandoning its responsibility. It is putting the responsibility on those who did not cause this.
What will the province of New Brunswick do? Where is it in all of this? It is responsible for plants. I think that speaks to exactly how bankrupt the government is in its federal-provincial relationships, as well as in understanding its jurisdiction and its responsibilities.
If there are no fish to catch and there is mismanagement of the fish that are to be caught, then fishermen cannot fish anything and, if fishermen do not have anything to fish, the consequential flow is that plant workers do not have anything to process and they, too, lose their jobs. What does the government do? It simply says that the province has to deal with it. The government caused it through mismanagement and now the stock needs to be cut this way. It has sole responsibility for this.
The Province of New Brunswick does not have one ounce of jurisdiction over what the quotas will be, who catches the quotas, where they land or what they do with it. The only level of government that decides those questions is the federal Government of Canada. What is the answer to the people, the government, the plant workers and the fishermen of New Brunswick? It is to talk to the fisheries minister of New Brunswick because the federal government has nothing to do with them. The same sweeps right across the entire region, whether it be Quebec, New Brunswick, P.E.I., Nova Scotia or Newfoundland and Labrador.
The federal government now is saying that if fishermen want a rationalization program, a publicly-funded licensed retirement program, they should talk to the province. The government issued the licence and it can take it away—