A lot of our fisheries now are under the ITQ system.
In my riding in Newfoundland, there's always the question of the fact that a fisherman is fully aware of his quota for his vessel, but he's concerned about the fact of safety. I'll just give you an example that happened to me about a year ago in my riding, where a fisherman lost his boat due to a storm, and he picked up another boat that was two feet longer than what the regulation called for under his licence. He went to DFO and asked whether he could use that. It wasn't the middle of the summer, it was September, but he had a fair bit of fishing left, and he asked DFO whether he could use this boat to finish out his season. They refused to do it because she was two feet longer than what she was supposed to be. Instead of 34 feet 11 inches, she was 37 feet. So he had to take her out of the water—he had bought her from somebody else—saw two feet off, and put her back in the water for an extra three weeks of fishing.
Now, down there they call that stupidity. I don't know what you call it up this way. Those kinds of regulations frustrate fishermen, number one, but also in a lot of cases they play around with the safety issue.
So I'm wondering, in the consultation process that's ongoing, if there is some thought process that's been given to the fact that a fisherman has a quota, regardless of size. I'm not talking about adding on 20 feet to a 30-foot vessel; I'm talking about adding on four or five feet to make that vessel safe on the water. Again, I'm not an expert--I'm far from it--but it seems to me that the fishery has changed so much over the past decade, and certainly two decades, but the regulations haven't. There seems to be a conflict here, and in a lot of cases the conflict is causing the safety issue.