Mr. Speaker, my colleague raises an interesting point. In fact, he knows that there are a number of reasons why the Atlantic cod experienced a serious decline, including overfishing, but that was only one of them. There were some environmental issues as well.
In fact, I was in a study on the Atlantic coast trying to determine why the cod had not rebounded. That was in 2005. In effect, some people did tell us that they had told DFO that the stocks were declining and that we should stop fishing. I remember distinctly asking one of them, “Did you stop fishing?” He said, “Of course we didn't stop fishing.” Therefore, there was a fair bit of blame to go around.
On the other point the member raised, the scientists at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans are talking to people regularly. They do more than 300 interviews a year with the media and certainly interact and relate, as I said in my comments, with other scientists, and they will continue to do that.