Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank the witnesses for coming today. As committee members, we want to give first line to our Newfoundland colleagues here because they're representing your interests first. However, I want to say that your views have been very well put forward today. Some of the things you've said are news to me, although we've had hearings on this before.
Mr. Winter, you put your case forward very forcefully and passionately. You raised some good questions about letters that seem to have gone unanswered. We are very interested in the things we're not discussing this morning about how we might move forward on this with the Fur Institute and DFAIT to actually form a strategy to combat this more forcefully.
We face similar issues here on the coast in the nose and tail of the Grand Banks with lack of enforcement. Now we're starting to take these issues much more seriously, and I think we're making headway on that front. There is hope on moving ahead on this file, but we obviously need to come up with a more effective strategy. For the record, I just want to let you know that message has been heard.
I am concerned about comments from fishers like Mr. Brown that he has to steam all those miles out there, sit idle for several days, put his life at risk because it's stormy out there, and then have to wait while other boats come along. It seems to me that when this season is as short as it is and you're trying to participate in the crab fishery as well, we have to look at management strategies that allow you to do what has to be done as quickly as possible. That might be helpful in keeping some of these other concerns at bay.
We've heard your message that science supports the use of the hakapik. I probably shouldn't say this on the record, but doggone it, I live on a hobby farm on Vancouver Island. It's about as far as you can get from here, frankly. If anybody had been around when that mink got in my chicken house and we were confronted by six dead chickens.... At the end of the day only one of us came out alive, but it was quite a battle, I'm telling you. It would have been handy to have had a hakapik or something. Those critters are fast.
I want to ask about incidents. You mentioned that you've been worried about people getting hurt. We were in St. Anthony the other day and we heard about fishermen being harassed. They're supposed to be 30 metres away. Have there been incidents here of people being in your face violating that? We had fishermen talk to us the other day about people attacking them with sticks, making threatening phone calls, naming their boats, publishing names, having people phone their homes and threaten family members, and so on. Is that part of your experience here as well? Can you elaborate on those concerns?