Mr. Speaker, this will be the second time that my speech is cut in half because of debate closure for the day and I have to continue the next day.
This will be my first debate without a prepared speech, so I will be taking a bit of time to pause to make sure my thoughts are coherent.
First, I want to talk about the timeline of what has taken place over the last year and a half on the study of marine protected areas and this legislation.
I looked at the mandate letter to the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, and I saw a comment there about protecting Canada's coastlines. This was also a Liberal promise. The Liberals did not make any commitments. They only made promises, which they continue to break. There was a promise in that mandate letter to protect Canada's coastlines.
In December 2016, I put forward a motion in the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans that the committee undertake a study to look at the criteria and the process for establishing marine protected areas in Canada, to determine whether the process that had been taking place was an efficient and effective way of doing things. As members have mentioned, it sometimes took seven to 10 years for a marine protected area to be established.
The committee finally started that study in April 2017. We travelled north to Inuvik, Paulatuk, and Tuktoyaktuk, and talked to people there. They have established MPAs that were put forward by the communities. Those MPAs are supported by the communities, and they have been very effective. We also travelled to Prince Rupert.
In the fall of 2017, we travelled to eastern Canada, and what we saw there was a totally different story. Marine protected areas were being proposed or established by government without any consultation with the local fishermen or the local communities that depended on access to the resources in those areas. There is the odd one that was proposed by the community, and it is working, but we saw opposition to the way this was being put forward. There was no good consultation with the fishermen, who felt that their livelihood, their families, their boats, and their communities were being put at risk by the imposition of government over them. We have seen this process play out over and over, particularly with this government, with its “trust us; government knows best” attitude.
We are getting into a really scary situation. We see it with the values test in the Canada summer jobs program. We see it with Service Canada not being able to refer to individuals as Mr. or Mrs., Sir or Madam. These are values tests being imposed by a government that says Canadians should trust it because it knows best. Canadians are concerned with that. I am concerned with that. My constituents are concerned with that.
Conservatives truly care about the environment. My background is in conservation. That is how I arrived in the House of Commons.
My first interest in politics showed up in the 1990s, when a former Liberal government introduced a long gun registry. I owned one older deer hunting firearm. I went to the local fish and game club and asked what I would have to do to comply with a government that thought it knew best.
An older gentleman in the club said that I should become a member. Not being one to sit back and keep my mouth shut, within a few months someone said I should become a director. A couple of years later, people said that I should become vice-president. I worked my way through that organization, through the regional branch of the BC Wildlife Federation, and eventually became president of the BC Wildlife Federation for two years.
In that time, I found conservationists and Conservatives hand in hand. They were firearms owners, guys working with boots in the streams, doing wild game counts, actual work on the ground for fish, wildlife, and habitat. We did not dream about locking it up. We thought about using it so we were getting something from those resources to put back into them.
What the Liberals are proposing, without consultation, is identifying huge swaths of the ocean and locking them up, doing this only in consideration of one previous year of traditional use or existing use. In our travel to eastern Canada, we heard from fishermen who were now fishing halibut in an area where there had not been halibut in five to seven years. If an MPA had been established there as a no-take area to protect the halibut, people would not be allowed to fish.
The government is proposing to draw lines on a map to protect an area when everything is changing. Fish move, water currents change. The government would protect an area through a space on a map and a line on a map without taking the time that had been taken in previous governments and in previous roles. Sometimes it was seven to 10 years. That is not a very fast process, but when they were done, they were done well and they worked. That should not change. If it takes that long to do something right, then do it. A slap-happy, push it forward, bulldoze it through method is not the right way to do things.
I will get back to the committee and the study it undertook on marine protected areas. That study has now been pushed back and delayed. It may never see the light of day because of the time allocation. The Liberals have called time allocation on Bill C-55, to amend the Oceans Act, which deals with marine protected areas. They are calling time allocation on Bill C-68, to amend the Fisheries Act. Both of those acts will have to come before the committee. The committee has not been able to wrap up its study on marine protected areas, so the Liberals are bulldozing, steamrolling over a committee process that was put in place. Now is it going to be totally ignored by a government that simply tell us to trust it because it know best. The Liberals do not want to hear about the consultation. They do not want to hear the testimony that concerned fishers and communities have put forward. Why?
Are they pushing back because we have asked for half an hour with the public safety adviser? I propose that may be the case, but that should not be the way government operates. Governments should listen to the people. In this case, the Liberals are shutting us down. We are not going to be able to finish our study at committee and make the recommendations to the government. I imagine there would have been a long series of recommendations from that study. We have a number of members on that committee from Atlantic Canada. I do not think they liked what they were hearing about the proposed process either. The previous process may not have been perfect, but the proposed process really concerned them the most. They were going to be shut out. They were going to be disallowed from their current areas of access and from their current process.