Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak at the end of this session on Bill C-30, the purpose of which is to allow workers in the fishing industry to take early retirement, at age 50. We want to say from the outset that the Bloc québécois will support this government initiative, for the following reasons.
When you come from a maritime region made up of very small communities, you see that there is no economic diversity at present. What is a 50-year old man or woman who is asked to go back to school supposed to do? Many of us realize that going back to school is very hard. The most painful thing for these workers we are discussing today is that going back to school for a period of two or three or five years, and then rejoining the labour force, is still pretty dicey. The point is not that these persons will be unable to work-I would be the first to hire them-but we must be realistic and work with the present economic conditions in the regions of Canada. The jobs are not there.
If I take my constituency as an example, the unemployment rate is 27 per cent. I have already said so, but at the end of this session I may take the liberty of sending that message again to the government side. An unemployment rate of 27 per cent, an activity rate of 42 per cent, means that four persons out of 10 who are old enough to work are looking for a job or are working. And that means there are six persons out of 10 who are not working.
In my constituency, the unemployment rate is 27 per cent. If I try to draw a parallel with the rate in Quebec, that province as a whole has an activity rate of 62 per cent; there is a 20-point spread. If, in order to compare the constituency of Gaspé with
the province of Quebec, I add that 20 per cent to the unemployment rate for Gaspé, I get 47 per cent, or nearly 50 per cent.
These figures can be found in many maritime communities. That is what has forced me to have discussions with my colleagues and reach the following conclusion: I, too, would like to be able to say, like the members of the Reform Party, that it is against my principles to hand out money, but we must face the facts: jobs are scarce.
For the enlightenment of the Reform Party, I will raise two points. Mr. Félix Leclerc, speaking about the unemployed and about paying people not to work, said, "It would kill them".
Yes, in our Quebec culture, we, too, have self-righteous people telling us that everyone old enough to work should pitch in. But the situation, this year and for the next few years, is not conducive to that philosophy.
The other small point I would like to make to my Reform colleagues is that I was a little surprised-but pleasantly surprised-to see that they would allow fisheries management by Maritimers themselves. I think the heart of the problem lies there.
I think that, if the people of the Maritime provinces had been responsible for managing or allocating their resource, we would not have the same problem we have today. I can say from having worked on the standing committee on fisheries that the witnesses we heard reflected that thinking. People want a part in decisions. They are the ones who experience the day to day problems, and very often there are local solutions to a local problem. Ottawa is a long way from Gaspé. Ottawa is a very long way from Newfoundland. How far? Six hours by plane from Newfoundland, and four and a half hours from my constituency. And it is even longer by car: remember that people in fishing communities cannot afford airfare.
If management were given back to the regions, things would be very different. But before people take sides on that idea, I would just like to say that it will not lead to any big constitutional squabbles about whether most fish stocks in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Atlantic come under individual quotas. The Government of Canada-since everyone is still Canadian for the moment-has already given responsibility for some of those quotas to the fishermen.
I know that there are members of this House who do not share my opinion, but I want to pursue this idea to its conclusion nonetheless.
I was saying, then, that in the Gulf of St. Lawrence 80 per cent of stocks come under individual quotas. Based on that fact, the remaining 20 per cent of fish stocks are allocated to inshore fishermen. If we had listened to the inshore fishermen long ago, we would not have had the problems we now have, because the inshore fishermen were the first ones who could not catch their share of Canada's quota. It may have been five years since they were last able to catch their share.
Using these figures, it may be easy to divide up the remaining quotas, on paper, for the time when the fishery reopens, provided we do not get greedy try to take more than our share. That is a suggestion I have for the government, that each fishing quota be further divided into individual quotas. After that, if all members here agree, we could whisper this suggestion loudly in the ear of the Minister of Fisheries.
Later, and this is the most difficult thing to manage, the total allowable catches will have to be determined jointly by the provinces and Ottawa or, if Quebec becomes sovereign, by Quebec and Ottawa within NAFO. These organizations need not be reinvented since they already exist. We would simply use the tools available.
We have not yet reached the sovereignty stage, however. I therefore suggest that Ottawa work in co-operation with the provinces to define the total allowable catch.
You would thus have Newfoundlanders stating theirs views concerning their own coasts, views that might be different from those along the gulf. Take, for example, the Gaspé area, which lies at the very end of the Gulf and where most of the fish caught are migratory. These fish will swim along the coast of Newfoundland before coming to Gaspé. The same goes for the southern part of the gulf. From Cape Breton, the fish will go up the coast to Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick before ending up off the Gaspé coast.
We have to act jointly so that everyone will understand the migratory movements of these fish. I find it extremely important that this point was raised by Reform members.
I have already expressed this view on other occasions. I know that the Premier of Newfoundland and I disagree sharply as well on the future of Quebec and Canada. However, I believe the Newfoundland premier's position is not that far off from the one I took during the election campaign. It is a position my Reform colleagues are now beginning to agree with. The Premier of Newfoundland spoke of setting up a committee in the province to set TACs and to divide up resources.
Where I disagree with him, however, is on the contention that a province should be allowed to set its own quotas, because
provinces share the same waters. When our TAC percentage is set before we sit down at the table, all that is left for us to do is to manage the resource properly. Provincial officials then go home and issue the licences needed to meet their quota, because each province has its own fleet. The provinces finance the fleets as well as the processing plants. This connection is very important.
Why am I speaking about this today in relation to Bill C-30 which provides for early retirement at 50 years of age? I always believed that wisdom would come with age. It galls me to have to support this measure but I want history to remember this so that these fishery workers will not have to pay twice for the administrative mistakes of the federal government.
Other points could also be mentioned. My colleagues raised a number of them at second reading. I would, however, like to emphasize one thing again at this time, namely that administrative rules should not prevent those taking early retirement from benefiting from economic initiatives. In time, some of the early retirees may decide they want to embark on a second career and they should not be prevented from doing so. Once they are back up to speed, they will be filing tax returns and the state will come out even on the deal, as they say. At this point in time, however, it is important that this bill be passed so as to ensure that these individuals, whether they live in Quebec, New Brunswick or Newfoundland, have food to put on the table.
Another concern of mine was-I asked questions to certain senior officials last week and put the question to the minister; perhaps we can get an official answer-will fishermen also be eligible under the same act? I have here a document which says that in the spirit of the existing legislation and the spirit of the fisheries recovery legislation-I do not remember the exact phraseology-fishermen would indeed become eligible for this pre-retirement plan when they turn 50. But I have not received a clear and firm answer on that. Yet, as one of our colleagues from the Reform Party pointed out at second reading, the Auditor General of Canada stated in his report that the government has to put a specific motion to the House before it can introduce such bills or authorize such public expenditures.
I have, on the one hand, the advice of the auditor general and, on the other hand, that of senior officials. First, I would like to comment on the bill as it now reads and second, I would like the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to administer its own pre-retirement program for fishermen.
I wanted to look at the next problem from this perspective. Much remains to be done. As far as the industry rationalization boards are concerned, some steps were taken but they have not been set up yet and we do not know what their membership will be. Why bring this up? Because establishing pre-retirement programs for fishermen will require extensive discussions with the provinces. As I said earlier, fishing boats were subsidized by the provinces.
How can we reconcile on the one hand, Ottawa giving fishermen a pre-retirement allowance and on the other hand, the province refusing to forgive the debt on boats? That would not make any sense. Again, how much of the $1.9 billion the minister has made available will be spent on pre-retirement programs? I do not want to see one single dollar of this money go to waste. I hope that the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans will come to an agreement with his provincial counterparts on this subject.
Failing which I would suggest that the resource envelope allocated to this measure be handed over to the province so that it can make appropriate arrangements. These are the general points I wanted to raise. Much was said about the high costs associated with this pre-retirement program and with the loss of expertise, but we did not hear much at all from the government, about ideas for the fisheries of the future.
Let us hear about it. This represents a $1.9 billion investment. I want to be sure we do not end up no further ahead after spending this kind of money. When he presented his program, the minister gave us the impression that we would have a better idea of the situation after six weeks of consultations. I do not have the date handy, but these six weeks must be almost up. We are coming to the end of the parliamentary session. Should I conclude that there will not be any new developments on these issues before the fall?
I think it would have been a good sign for the minister to issue guidelines before the end of the parliamentary session, in order to guide industry and continue discussions during the summer. If we wait until the fall, we should decide quickly what to do with fishermen. The minister's program deals with community and environmental projects-the expression "green projects" is used-but I want to remind you that it is difficult to work on the environment in late October. We should make plans right away to ensure that something will be put forward this summer.
Future involves other things as well. What industrial structure do we want to set up? Quebec and Canada were discovered because of our resources, namely fish or cod to be more precise. We exploited this resource in a traditional fashion. The first effective way to preserve fish was to salt and dry it. We still do it, but it has become a special product. There are other species of fish. When freezers arrived on the scene, as I mentioned, we produced frozen cod blocks, but there are still other species we have not exploited.
The current market trend is fresh fish. It is therefore necessary to handle smaller volumes of fish but consumers are willing to pay a little more in return.
My wish is that, during moratorium years, we could establish a system to try to optimize catches for each species-we would, of course, only keep mature fish to avoid depleting other stocks and repeating the mistakes we may have made with cod-in order to commercialize these species.
That is something we heard a lot of under the former Conservative government. Why did it not work? Because tools were missing and it was too marginal, we were told. But now, regarding the few cod stocks still open in Canadian zones, I can tell you that dogfish catches may be as large if not larger than current cod catches in the other zones that remain open.
The missing tool is a hopper on the wharf, so that fishermen can converge on a site. This hopper will allow us to concentrate on certain species, so that there will be enough to make people take notice. I call them "unloading areas". There are some in Europe. Of course, in certain places, it also led to a concentration of ships.
Nevertheless, the coastal villages around these landing sites are not closed, except that the fish is landed somewhere and the nearby plant, which wants to have the product, can process it. For this, the fish must be kept cold. But we can do all that now, since we have skilled workers who are especially eager to work because working is also an honour.
People now collecting a cheque at home would really like to do something constructive and know that the dry period they are going through will end. There must be light at the end of the tunnel. They do not have any now. Something important to have would be landing areas.
In addition to that is what I proposed, a provincial hub for marketing these resources. There is a way to do that as well. These are things that must be done. Some supporting figures-I see some hon. members from Nova Scotia watching us-a manager of a Nova Scotia company told me once: "Yvan, 20 per cent of the fresh fish we land account for 40 per cent of our profits."
It is easy to extrapolate from that. I realize that it takes a certain volume, but I would really like this idea to be used. Maybe the government opposite can change it a little, because if the suggestion comes from an opposition member, sometimes it is not considered good, but I would remind them that I did not hesitate to support Bill C-30, as I did not hesitate to support the bill on overfishing. So, as a demonstration of good faith, I think that the Bloc is here to promote sound management, but not to hide its political orientation.
But when we look at disorders and problems such as we see here today, I think that I can set aside my partisanship for the sake of good fishery management. I wanted to add a few words on how workers could benefit from this aid.
I want to be sure that every worker in the fishing industry is well represented under this new agreement. I hope they will have union representation and some provincial agreements because I want to be sure that workers will not be less themselves in front of the big machine of Ottawa. That is what I want to add on that.
In closing, I want to make a wish: I hope that these industry workers will meet the challenge now. May they now be assured of subsistence through a financial allowance for early retirement and may they get down to work to earn a little extra for making ends meet. I would ask them to work with their communities and call on everyone to do his bit so that in five years, there will be something else, always keeping in mind that the fisheries might recover, but analyzing what can be done about it now.
I would like to leave you with these remarks, Madam Speaker, and remind you that the Bloc Quebecois will support Bill C-30 and hope that the government will consider past federal mismanagement and what people in the provinces and the maritime communities are saying so that we never have to relive what we are going through.
