Are there any other questions, gentlemen?
Thank you very much to our presenters. I think some very useful information was exchanged here today.
Maybe in wrapping up I'll take a second to see if I can summarize some of the points that have been made here. DFO officials will tell us that if you build larger boats they will demand more effort and put more pressure on the fish stocks. More pressure on the fish stocks will put stocks in decline that are already under pressure.
In some fisheries that may be true, and I certainly have that in my own riding of southwest Nova Scotia, where there's a big lobster fishery, but it's still not an ITQ system. If you have 375 pots, you can set 375 pots. You can catch 50,000, 100,000, or 15,000 pounds of lobster according to the type of fisherman and the type of bottom you're fishing on.
Is it safe to say that the rules that were brought in 30 years ago to limit the amount of groundfish caught are no longer applicable when you have individual quotas for all fishermen? I fail to understand what difference the length of your boat makes if you're allowed 50,000 pounds of fish or 10,000 pounds of crab--I'm just picking numbers out of the air. Where is the correlation to the length of your boat?
In recent years we've seen boats being built, and because they have a licence for a 44-foot 11-inch boat they have to make it as profitable as possible. So they've made the boat wider with more beam, deeper, and in some cases less seaworthy.
Is that an oversimplification of the facts, or is that close to what has happened?