Madam Speaker, I can recognize that as a university student the member may have been shocked, but I had been working for years with inshore fishermen who went to the Federal Court to try to reduce the quota so that the jobs would not be lost. They were not shocked. As they always put it, the moratorium was not declared by the Government of Canada. It was declared by National Sea Products and Fishery Products International when they scooped up the last fish and could not find anything because they had taken over the offshore with draggers that destroyed that fishery, with the support of DFO and the government at the time.
I refer to the TAGS program. I will tell my friend from St. John's East that the fisheries retraining process did not help the workers who were on those fishing boats. They were devastated. Thirty thousand jobs were lost overnight. While a new generation left Newfoundland to find jobs elsewhere, Newfoundland has an economy now that is swimming in red ink because of the idiotic decision to build Muskrat Falls. The jobs did not come back to the small communities.
If the current government comes up with a program to help the workers, it should make it community-based, not individual. That TAGS program, which wasted a lot of money, should have gone to groups of workers organized through their union, to create new opportunities. They will come up with better ideas than the federal government will.