Merci, Mr. Blais. Thank you very much for that question. I'm not surprised that it was your first question, having sat with you on the committee. It certainly is near and dear to your heart, and representing an area like you represent, again I'm not surprised.
In my first term here, when I had a large rural area, which was taken away with the boundary change, I had the same problem. In fact, if you want to dig back to where the $20 million came from, it came as a result of a report from this committee that enunciated clearly to the government at the time the dire straits in relation to small crafts harbours. If you want to know who introduced that topic to the committee, I did, so I'm well aware of the issue. I'm well aware of its importance.
When the committee did that report--it was the first day, actually, that I was on the committee, in September 2001, and shortly after that we had our hearings, and the report was tabled a year or so after that--the evidence that was presented to the committee spelled out clearly that to bring the wharves that are solely owned by the fisheries up to par would take $400 million. At the same time, we were told that 21% or 23%--I'm not sure which--of the wharves were actually unsafe to use. That hasn't changed a tremendous amount. When I say solely owned, these are wharves that were built and are owned by small crafts harbours situated in what we call core harbours. They are now maintained, or run, in most cases by harbour authorities.
To add to that, we have around the country a number of other wharves that are used and have been used by fishermen, built maybe with some help from small crafts harbours--usually they provide the materials. Transport might have been involved in some. A lot of them were built with funding through programs like the Canada works program, in many areas. It was all government money--and we've said that before publicly--regardless of who owned them. Some of them were well constructed; some of them were sort of put together, for whatever reason. Many of these are also in pretty hard shape now, and in some areas these are the only wharves people have and they depend on them, so that complicates the issue even further.
Recognizing the fact that we are in trouble trying to maintain what we have and upgrade where we can, there are a number of initiatives under way. Number one, we added again this year an extra $11 million from the permanent funding we got. So we have added $11 million that will be there into the future each year. Is that going to fill the gap? No, it's not. So it's our intention again, as we go through the budgetary process, to put wharves, hopefully, in a different light to show the importance of them and to try to get to where we were and even increase that.
On top of that, we have a change in the fishery out there. We're seeing people go from small boats to big boats in many areas. I myself know a couple of harbours that were very active small boat operations. Now the few people who are left have gone to bigger boats, and because they have bigger boats, they can no longer use the harbour. They've had to move to a harbour a little bit farther away. We're seeing--and hopefully we'll talk a little more about this before the morning is over--a major coming together of everybody involved in industry, and I'm talking about the so-called summit meetings in Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and now, next month actually, in Quebec. We're looking, in the industry generally, at how we can move forward and how we can consolidate.
Part of that will be on land as well as on the sea. We're talking about people wanting to get out of the fishery, about making it easier for people to come together in a buddy-up system, or for industry buy-outs, whatever the case might be. The same thing has to happen on land, as has been admitted by the ministers and, in some cases, the premiers.
That is going to put a somewhat different face on the area. You're probably going to see areas of interest--communities of interest, as somebody termed them--where, to make sure the area is alive, we can concentrate our resources and make sure we can keep some plants going and going for a longer period of time, that we catch our resource at the right time, that we catch it properly, and we have to have the proper landing and handling facilities.
All of this will mean a refocusing. Will it mean less money? Probably not. Will it mean better service? Probably so. It might mean fewer wharves will be needed, but you can't tell that to somebody who's 20 miles and over and has a small boat.
So basically, to answer the question, yes, we're aware of the funding. We've already added some, and we'll be going after as much as we can, to try to do as much as we can where it makes sense to spend our money.