Madam Speaker, I determined at committee this morning that the NDP did support our call for a judicial inquiry, which makes it clear that it is the government that is avoiding the issue of a judicial inquiry by its own actions.
The government will take advice from itself not to do what the motion calls for. The problem with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans is that it is investigating its own actions and it has a vested interest not to get to the bottom of the fact that it was its management style and management practices that led to the 1992 and 1994 collapses on the Fraser River.
Those collapses were investigated by Pearse-Larkin in 1992 and they blamed DFO mismanagement. They were investigated again in 1994 by John Fraser and he also blamed DFO mismanagement.
That is why the government is in this kind of cover-up. It does not want to have true independence because that would l point out that it has learned no lesson.
I am glad the parliamentary secretary has been to British Columbia and is now a three day expert but what I am very disappointed about is not knowing where the British Columbia Liberal members of Parliament stand on this very important issue. They are not speaking to this issue and that concerns me.
The Government of Canada has a constitutional obligation to British Columbia to conserve the resource and optimize the fishery. The British Columbian economy will lose hundreds of millions of dollars in 2008 and beyond because of DFO mismanagement that happened this year and that has been happening for many years, and we need to fix it.
It is the Liberal parliamentary secretary who is invoking that we might have some racial conflict if we were to actually try to get to the bottom of it. It is not us. That is another typical Liberal ploy to avoid some unpleasant truths, which has everything to do with the way the Liberals are mishandling the file.
I appeal to the parliamentary secretary to do what is right and I say that the truth will set him free. Let us have a judicial inquiry. I would like to hear the response of the parliamentary secretary to those comments.