Madam Speaker, I want to thank my friend from Avalon, who I know sits on the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans. I know that he cares about coastal communities. We talk a lot about the importance of salmon and fish to coastal communities for culture, the economy, and food security. We know that over the last decade, we saw our fish stocks decline rapidly under the Conservative government.
We had the parliamentary secretary of fisheries and oceans, who is from Burnaby North, come to my riding to look at the state of our salmon and to travel the Somass. He was on the front page of the Alberni Valley News, and he said:
It means we’re going to be able to do better science and better stock assessments. For so long, communities have had a lot of good projects like the group here (West Coast Aquatic) that they’ve wanted to get done but we haven’t had the financial ability to move forward on it because the federal government has been somewhat absent.
Madam Speaker, guess how much funding they got. Zero. They could not be more absent than zero. Even the Conservatives, in their failure, delivered some funding to this community. When is the government going to understand the urgency and the threat to our salmon? Our hatcheries have not had an increase in 28 years. This is a desperate situation.