Those are excellent questions, and being focused on the fishery consumption side is nothing to be denigrated for at all for. I heartily endorse it and recommend it. We think we are fish-eaters in Canada. We are not fish-eaters in the volumes that we could and should be, as some other jurisdictions are. It's healthy food. I often throw up a picture of a very young, good-looking couple when I make presentations and say, “Look, this is a couple that has eaten fish; they know the benefits, and those are my grandparents.”
In terms of recommendations, after I spoke I wondered whether I had made it clear enough as to why I would address such comments to the finance committee. It is because of the lost opportunity costs. The opportunity cost is great in terms of the value that the fishery could provide to the economy, so as a committee, as you look at productivity and what businesses might do—and the fishery is a business, and at the same time, there are aspects of it that are less focused on the business side—there are things we could recommend. I'd be happy to provide a more detailed brief.
The seafood value chain round table, part of Agriculture Canada, has done work on this. The Conference Board of Canada issued the report “From Fin to Fork” a few years ago, which detailed a number of recommendations I could go into. There was “The Sunken Billions” report from the FAO and the World Bank in 2008, which also detailed how fleet buyout programs may produce more value in the industry by allowing capital accumulation for harvesters to reinvest and change the technology in terms of gear and vessels.
There are a number of precise things I could recommend, which I will be happy to provide to all committee members.