For all those who have just joined us and didn't see my presentation at the previous meeting, an elver is a baby eel. They're not as cute as seals but worth a lot more: $5,000 a kilogram. They're caught live, shipped to Asia, grown into full eels and eaten.
At my first meeting with the minister, I said, “You have a problem with the elver fishery.” All the big to-dos in the fisheries department were there—the deputy minister and all the ADMs. They were so afraid of little old me that they flew the director general of Nova Scotia in all the way to Ottawa for this meeting. It was little old me and my legislative assistant then, a fine young fellow named Matthew Clark, who was 23 years old. Matthew Clark and I, apparently, intimidated the fisheries department before we'd even had a meeting with them. Maybe that's because I defeated the fisheries minister. That might have had something to do with it.
I raised elvers with her. Do you know what the minister said to me? The Minister of Fisheries of Canada said to me, “What's an elver?”