I'll agree primarily with that statement, but we don't even necessarily have to go to the stability. If we want to look after the cod moratorium in 1993, a lot of Newfoundland fishermen were uncertain about their futures as fishermen. Some of them reintroduced some of their inactive licences, and one of them was for crab. However, the cubic number was a restriction based on groundfish, and if you had a vessel with multiple licences, you had to comply with the most restrictive requirement or give up that licence.
Back then, everyone said the cod was coming back, so the fishermen didn't want to give up their cod licence. They tried to start doing something two to five to ten miles from shore, doing their little cod weirs in their little 35-foot boat. They couldn't go beyond 30, 40, or, as we call it, 35 feet. So they said, how are we going to prosecute a fishery that's 100, 150, and 200 miles out there? The only way they could do that with their existing boats, or with new ones, was stick to the 35-footers and go higher to allow for more fuel, carriage of grub, crew, and everything. Then they were operating in a less safe boat out there than if they would have been allowed to get 45- or 50-footers. That's where a lot of fatalities came into place.
Merv Wiseman, a DFO search and rescue coordinator, did a number of reports at the CMAC meetings. He came up with that a number of years ago, back when we first started with the new Canada Shipping Act, and you could see a lot of it was the 35-footers. Not only was it that, but most of the instances—as they call them, not accidents—were where they were called in for service, even if it was a tow. Most of those 35-footers simply ran out of fuel. They couldn't supply enough fuel, carry their bait and crew, and go out the required distance to prosecute the fishery.
Transport Canada will say, well, they don't have to go out that far. But they do if that's were the fish are. Since the funding package was running out after a couple of years, they had to find something new to do.