Mr. Cleary, your first question is related to capacity or what else is available for the inshore fisher to move on to from where we're at today. There are other species certainly, whelk, sea cucumber, mackerel, herring, turbot, that make up that enterprise, but for someone who holds the shrimp allocation, access to the inshore is extremely important. That varies among regions of the province, as you probably know.
The challenge here with the issue that we're facing is that some of the enterprises that left only have shrimp left and a reduction this year, and any future reduction under LIFO, is going to be devastating for them. You're talking about taking that enterprise out, because after what they've invested since 2007, as I indicated in regard to the permanent stakeholders, they will have nothing.
Shrimp is part of those other enterprises, and they have other varied species. When we're growing our fishing industry we need enterprises with multiple and we can't afford.... If we lose them through science, in this particular case it needs to be equally distributed so that everybody shares some of the pain.
In regard to your recommendation 3, as a province we've had concerns the past number of years about a pullback by DFO in science and research, to the point where we as a province have invested heavily in science and research in Newfoundland and Labrador, certainly for the centre for eco-research at the Marine Institute, and in looking at that ecosystem research and science. This is not looking at specific species, but at the interactions among species and what these mean. You make decisions based on the interactions of those species. It's extremely important.
This is what we're talking about, this is where we need to get to. We need to start that. It should have been done yesterday collectively by DFO, but we need to at least start now. We're doing our part, we've entered into areas that are under federal jurisdiction in regard to science, because we know it's a priority. We just think it's apparent as we go forward in managing the fishery that we have proper fishery management science and information to make those decisions.