Madam Speaker, I was in Atlantic Canada, in Miramichi, a couple of weeks ago meeting with all the Atlantic salmon stakeholders. To a group, they were scathing in terms of the actions of DFO, its incompetence, its indifference to communities, and its lack of respect for communities. DFO staff evidently think their clients are the fish. To us, clients are the people who use the fish.
There is the issue of the striped bass that the government is not acting on. There is the issue of seal predation that the government is not acting on. It took a non-governmental organization, the Atlantic Salmon Federation, to strike a deal with Greenland to prevent its overfishing. There are some invasive species getting into these watersheds and DFO is preventing good conservation work to be done to get rid of those invasive species, and if they get into Atlantic salmon habitat, there will be some serious predation issues.
DFO was shown to me to be completely incompetent, and that stands at the feet of the fisheries minister.