Mr. Speaker, rattling off a list of projects that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans spends money on misses the point of the motion.
Let me address one of the points of the motion by asking the minister about muzzling scientists and not letting them talk to people.
If we go back to the announcement that Conservative Minister John Crosbie made in 1992 announcing the moratorium on the cod fishery and we try to understand how it is that we fished out all the cod without realizing it, we realize that fishery scientists thought there was a bunch of fish out there but the inshore fisherman, who actually went out and tried to catch fish, were saying that the number of fish was decreasing, as was their size.
The government scientists and the inshore fishermen were not talking. What they really should have done was sat down and said, “Boy, we disagree on the state of the cod population. We'd better sit down and resolve this”. If they had done that, we may not have fished out the Atlantic cod.
What I want to ask my hon. colleague is this. Does he not agree with me that, if the government scientists had been talking with the people in Canada and exchanging ideas and information, we would have been in a better state in this country?