I have two things, Mr. Chair.
For the record, let me come back to a comment that Mr. Asselin made. He asked who runs the department, the bureaucrats or the minister. I have some of the greatest people in the public service working in my department. They will tell you, and I will tell you, that it's my job to run the department. If there are problems, if there are weaknesses, forget about credit—none of us as politicians get credit—blame me, because the buck stops here. We're the ones who make the decisions, and we're the ones who give the direction.
In relation to Mr. Stoffer's question about the owner-operator, that was a contentious issue around the table, and we said we would deal with that. It's an issue that has to be cleaned up. It is a relatively complicated issue, and let me just run through it. In fact, there are people around this table, Mr. Stoffer, who were with me when we discussed this very issue. And I'm not talking about public servants alone.
I'll use some examples. One that really frustrates a lot of us is the plant owner who in hard times supplied fishermen with money for engines, repairs, whatever, in lieu of turning over their first born to the company. Some of them control numerous licences. They don't hold them. A fishermen has to legally, on paper, hold the licence.
Then you have the guy next door with a buddy who is leaving, so he buys out his buddy. He leaves the licence in his buddy's name, which is the only way it can work, and he or she has one or two licences.
Then you have the businessman in the town, whether he is an undertaker or a grocery store owner or whatever, who owns five or six licences simply because, again, he had enough money to buy them out. The fellow operating the boat gets his meagre income, and the fellow who is not involved in the fishery rakes in the profits.
Then you have groups where fishermen themselves came together, and in some cases—you have some in your own province—because of the way they handled it, they turned out very successful operations that kept communities alive.
You're trying to deal with all of these, but the bottom line is that the licence is owned by a fisherman. The value we derive from the resource in the harvesting side, and whatever else follows, should be to those who are directly involved in the fishery. That's where we're headed. It is being worked on, and hopefully over the next months we'll be dealing with it publicly.