Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise in the House today on behalf of the federal New Democratic Party to discuss the very serious issue of what happened to the Fraser River sockeye in 2004. If I may first give a historical review of this situation, our review of the Fraser River sockeye salmon quite possibly could enter into a debate about where we go in the future.
I have been a member of the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans since June 1997. I am currently the second longest serving member on the Standing Committee of Fisheries and Oceans, besides my colleague from the Delta area. Of all the committees in which I have had a chance to participate, this committee is the best one in the House of Commons.
At first there were five political parties; now there are four and the reality is that how the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans works is the way that government and Parliament should work. We have had four chairmen since I have been there, each one of them very good. Our current chair from Scarborough, Ontario is outstanding. We may disagree on other issues but as the chair of our committee, he does a very good job for us. I am proud to work with him and colleagues from the Conservative, Bloc and Liberal parties in order to advance the issues of fishermen and their families throughout the country.
On the debate of the inquiry, the question is whether or not we should have a judicial inquiry into what happened to the Fraser River sockeye salmon. My simple answer is that we should. I will relate the reason to another event that is happening now, which is how quickly the government moved to have a judicial inquiry into the sponsorship scandal. A whole bunch of money somehow went away, went into pockets of people, friends and associates, and what did the current Prime Minister say? “We are going to get to the bottom of this. The Canadian people have a right to get to the bottom on this”. What did he do? He called for a judicial inquiry into the sponsorship scandal.
If we correlate that to today's discussion, the Canadian people have a right to know what happened to their public resource, the salmon. Mr. David Bevan, an ADM at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, a gentleman for whom I have great respect, handed out a document to us in committee the other day which states that fisheries is a common property resource belonging to the Canadian people, to be managed by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans on behalf of the Crown.
I agree with him. That fish belongs to all Canadians, not just British Columbians. The department has the constitutional duty and obligation to manage that resource in the way that benefits the majority of Canadians. If anyone could stand in this House and say that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has done a good job, that statement would have originated from the south end of a north bound cow because it simply is not true.
If we look at the east coast of Canada, for example, since the collapse of the cod stocks we have spent $4.5 billion of taxpayers' money to readjust the east coast fishery. What happened the other day in Harbour Breton, Newfoundland? The plant shut down. Over 300 people lost their jobs. We have to ask ourselves, why? There are many reasons.
The Liberals are so afraid of having a judicial inquiry because it would open up a can of worms which they would not be able to close. All of a sudden things would come out that the government would be very afraid to have disclosed.
Mr. Bevan said that this is a common property resource, but what we see in this country is the very rapid privatization of that resource into fewer and fewer hands. On the west coast today, Jimmy Pattison's company effectively controls 50% of the wild salmon stocks. How did that happen? If we go back to 1996, the fisheries minister, Mr. Mifflin, a former admiral in our forces, brought in the so-called Mifflin plan on the west coast.
Immediately in early 1998 the committee went to the west coast to communities like Sointula. We saw a fisherman, his wife and three children crying before the committee. He was in tears about the Mifflin plan which brought in area stacking of licences.
For years and years fishermen could go from Victoria to Prince Rupert and fish their quota up and down the coast. Then the Mifflin plan was brought in with area stacking which meant that fishermen were boxed in. If they wanted to fish in another area, which they historically had rights to, they had to stack their licence. This meant that they had to pay another $100,000 in order to have that privilege, a privilege that they and their ancestors had had for years. Many fishermen could not afford that. Effectively the government got rid of a lot of fishermen, but the fish ended up in the hands of the corporations.
On the east coast we have trust agreements with our lobster stocks. The fact is we believe in the owner-operator principle. There has to be a separation from the operator of the vessel and the ownership of that.
Last week I spoke to three guys who just signed over trust agreements to a company in Nova Scotia. A trust agreement means that a company owns it. The company gives the fishermen the money to buy the licences, but they have to fish for that company and sell their catch to that company. They are no longer independent fishermen, like the small independent family farmer. They now owe themselves to the company store.
Slowly but surely, actually very rapidly, the fishery is being corporatized. I have said for years that this is the direction in which the government has been going. The government will never admit it. It will never stand up in the House and say, “We want to corporatize the public resource to manage it more effectively and do whatever”. If that is the reason, the government should come out and say it.
At least Joey Smallwood when he was Premier of Newfoundland said to the people, “I am going to resettle you into other communities”. This is a resettlement by stealth. It is absolutely unacceptable that the government can treat fishermen in this manner. We owe it to Canadian families and fishermen and their families from coast to coast to coast and our inland waters to have a much better government and a much better Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
The department receives $1.5 billion of taxpayers' money every year to do one thing and one thing only, to protect the fish and fish habitat. To say that it has been doing a good job is simply not correct at all. This is why a judicial inquiry would be very helpful.
The argument that a judicial inquiry would take a long time is absolutely correct, but that has not stopped the government from having the independent inquiry that is going on already. It has not prevented that from happening. The government could do both. If the government was willing to call an inquiry into the sponsorship scandal, then it should be willing to have an inquiry into the fisheries concern as well.
One of the most frustrating things for the opposition is with respect to committee reports. The Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans, as I have stated, is one of the best committees that a member could ever sit on. I am honoured and privileged to work with my colleagues on all sides of the House. In 1998-99 we did two reports on the west coast, the interim report and the final report of 1998-99.
My colleague from Vancouver Island North of the Alliance Party at that time moved concurrence in the report in the House of Commons. We had a unanimous report, which means that nine Liberals, including the chair, had to agree to every word of that report, otherwise they would not have signed it.
We stood up in the House of Commons and voted on that report. Five Liberals of that committee did not show up for the vote, although three of them were in town. Four of them, who had signed on to the report, were in the House. They stood up and voted against their own report. They were told by the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans that it was not what the government wanted, that the government wanted something else.
Why would they sign on to a unanimous report only to stand up in the House of Commons a month later and vote against their own report? It is simply unacceptable that that kind of behaviour happens in the House of Commons.
We spend a lot of taxpayers' money travelling the country, listening to witnesses, hearing the evidence, and drafting a report. Anyone who has been on a committee knows there is a lot of tug and pull in a committee about language, words and what can happen and what cannot happen. I have issued minority reports because I could not accept the overall version of where a report was going, but that is my prerogative and the prerogative of other members as well. If the Liberal members had a problem with that report, they never should have agreed to it.
This frustrates Canadians. They hear us when we go to their communities, such as La Scie, Newfoundland; Sointula, British Columbia; Prince Albert, Saskatchewan; and Trois-Rivières, Quebec. We listen to their concerns. We say that we are going to do a report, that we are going to try to make it unanimous and put pressure on the government, only in turn to have the government tell the committee members, “You did a good job but we are not going to listen to it”. That is very frustrating.
When we did a report on the MCTS services of the Coast Guard in Ucluelet, British Columbia, Mike Henderson was then heading the Coast Guard on the west coast. The first question I asked him was whether he had enough money and manpower to do the job that we asked him to do. Mr. Henderson's comment was “money is not a problem”. That is exactly what he said to us.
We then went to Victoria, Tofino and Ucluelet and told the workers and the middle managers in those stations exactly what their boss had told us. They were fit to be tied. A lady in Victoria said she had been screaming for millions of dollars for equipment and manpower and asked what the heck that guy was talking about. We went to Ucluelet and spoke to a woman who worked every single day in August because the service was short staffed. She worked every single day.
How can someone say to the committee that money is not a problem? How can someone say that everything is just fine when out in the field it is completely the reverse?
It frustrates people like myself on a standing committee when we ask middle managers and people within DFO direct, simple questions, and I cannot say they misled us on purpose, but their answers are certainly not forthcoming in the affirmative. They are out of touch with reality.
When we were in Ucluelet, one gentleman came to us to tell his story about what was going on. The day of the committee he was issued a disciplinary letter from DFO. Of course DFO management said that the letter concerned something completely different from his appearance before the committee, but the timing was very suspect.
Why would the Department of Fisheries and Oceans do that? Why would it do that? It sent a very clear message, that if anybody else spoke to the committee in an open forum, thou shall be disciplined. That is not on the official record of course, but that is the interpretation it left. That is really unacceptable.
This is why my party is demanding whistleblower protection to protect the workers for a very long time. I would only hope that one day the Liberal government would see the light and protect those people.
We have other issues in the Department of Health. We know what happened there and those are grave concerns.
A few years ago Ransom Myers and Jeffrey Hutchings, two very prominent scientists within DFO, issued a very scathing report of science misinformation within the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. They accused the department and the government of misleading scientific information, misinterpreting scientific information for political means. That was a very scathing report.
We in Nova Scotia for many years were very proud of the Bedford Institute of Oceanography. It was one of the greatest institutes in the world for oceanographic studies. We are very proud of the people who are there still. There is just not enough of them. It is a shell of its former self.
The government consistently, minister after minister after minister, has told me and others in the House that it operates on the precautionary principle and on the best available scientific information. If it does not have the scientific information to begin with, how can it possibly say that it is operating on the precautionary principle? That is what is so frustrating. What happens and what is said are two completely different things.
No wonder the Conservative Party of Canada is asking for a judicial inquiry into the Fraser River sockeye. Something happened to those fish. We can blame it on the environment. We can blame it on wrong science. We can blame it on commercial fishermen. We can blame it on aboriginals. We can blame it on all kinds of people, but the fact is there is only one management team, and it is the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. It is ultimately responsible for the management of those stocks.
Mr. Speaker, you know, as you live right where it happened. You had grave concerns when you appeared before a formal committee. I have never seen you on our committee, but I was very impressed with your knowledge of what happened in your back yard in terms of the fishery. You asked some very good questions. I might add that they were very good questions which were never answered. Seeing as you represent the area, I think you have a right to those answers.
As a former British Columbian and a person who lived in the Yukon, and who now lives on the east coast, what I have seen happen to the fisheries in this country is simply unacceptable. It is time to open it up.
In 1998 Michael Harris wrote a book called Lament for an Ocean: The Collapse of the Atlantic Cod Fishery. He had studied and followed our fisheries committee for quite some time. In November 1997 I was new here, but I already knew that the department was out of control. I asked for a judicial inquiry into the practices and policies of the entire department. It went absolutely no where. Hopefully, we are now going to have a judicial inquiry into one small aspect of the department regarding the Fraser River sockeye. That is the least we can do.
There is no doubt that my colleague from Delta and I disagree on certain aspects of quota management in the fishery. As a commercial fisherman himself, I believe he was sincere when he talked about his serious concerns regarding the stocks.
Management of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans on the west coast of British Columbia is incredible. When I first came here, there were discussions about highway maintenance, and building new roads and bridges on Vancouver Island. That totally wiped out fish bearing streams. It was the department's job to ensure that did not happen. We were told afterward that some errors had been made, but the department would ensure they would not happen again.
We heard concerns about lifting the moratorium on aquaculture. We heard concerns about sea lice. We still do not have the proper scientific information on them. We have conflicting information. The government said it operates under the cautionary principle, but one would think that it would wait until it received all the information possible.
We received records today about a meeting between Larry Murray, the deputy minister of fisheries, Richard Wex, the director general of fisheries on the west coast and Terence Chandler, the head of Redfern Resources, who wants to build a road 160 kilometres long through the beautiful watershed of the Tlingit people in the northern Taku. John Ward, chief of the Tlingit people in the northern British Columbia area, asked for that same type of meeting, but he could not get it. Why would DFO meet with a mining company to discuss roads and a mine, and not meet with aboriginal leaders in that regard? That is unacceptable.
I firmly believe that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans could eliminate many independent fishermen. We have seen this done on the farm. Many farmers have lost their ability to farm on their land and have left the farm altogether. The land is still producing because huge corporate farms have taken over from individual farms. Ever since the 1982 Kirby report, larger companies have been fishing our waters. Slowly but surely, independent fishermen are losing their ability to fish. There are a myriad of reasons for that.
DFO needs a cleansing of its soul. There are some good people working for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. I speak to them on a regular basis from Cape Breton to Vancouver Island. There are very good people on the ground, but there is not enough of them. There are 1,600 good people working at 200 Kent Street, but no one is fishing for salmon or cod in the Rideau Canal.
We need to get to the bottom of what happened to the Fraser River sockeye. Although a judicial inquiry would be a long process, it may solve the problem and allow DFO employees to speak freely without retribution. It would also allow the independent review that the minister has already allocated.
It does not matter if the minister is changed, the department still has serious flaws that need to be corrected. We hope we can learn from our mistakes, learn from what happened to the sockeye, and protect the interests of fishermen and their families.
