Terribly tough chairman here. He's always watching the minutes, so I'll have to be very careful.
With the tobacco farmers, and my colleague here mentioned other members, I know we talked about that with Lloyd St. Amand just before we left Ottawa for committee. You're into another growing season, and you're still apparently quite a long distance away from making an arrangement with the government to satisfy both groups. Oddly enough, this tobacco industry also affects people in my constituency, and they've been hurt by it, because a lot of the seasonal workers who came to Ontario were from my area over the years, so they have found hurt and a need for alternative employment.
On the exit strategies, I would think you have looked at the other provinces with tobacco, but also in the fishing industry we have exits. On my coast with the Atlantic salmon, on the west coast with the Pacific salmon, in all those exits, people have been hurt. In Atlantic Canada, some people who didn't settle with the government back in the late 1970s, early eighties, are still holding licences, their quotas, and they can't use them and they never did get any satisfactory recompense for their business. They're simply out of luck, I guess we'd have to say now, because things have passed them.
How close or how far are we in terms of a settlement? Has an offer been made to you by the federal government, or is it simply a stonewalling, that they've never really come with any satisfactory offer on the table?
Mark is ready for that one, I'm sure.