They never did want to study the impact. The mandate of DFO should be to study the viability of every fishery in British Columbia that they seem to be giving quotas away on. We seem to be settling land claims with fish quotas in British Columbia.
When you come to the east coast, to Atlantic Canada, they have interim measures where they give the permits, licences, give them a quota, and then they start buying it back from the industry. In British Columbia we don't do that. What they do is buy the odd licence back, find out it's too much money, and then turn around and decide they're just going to issue licences. And nobody stops it.
If you look at spawn-on-kelp--you can see how small our membership is--we get railroaded by industry. The interim agreement for this year was signed by the roe herring industry. We're not even on the board that signed it, and DFO pushed it through; they've given the 92,000 pounds. Then they write a letter, which I have right here, to industry saying, oh, we've just made a deal with Heiltsuk, and we're going to have peace in the central coast roe herring fishery; we're giving them 92,000 pounds of roe-on-kelp.
You cannot trade apples for oranges, which is what they've been doing. They keep saying they're going to retire licences and they don't. If you look at the Heiltsuk deals, they were supposed to retire licences and then they turned around and reversed it. The only licences they've retired for Heiltsuk are three gillnet licences, when they were supposed to retire six. The rest of it is just being made up.
When I say “apples and oranges”, what I'm getting at is that you can keep putting roe-on-kelp up for sale and you have roe herring for sale. They're two different markets. One does not balance the other. They're totally different. That's what our problem is.
If you retire licences, it does not help people who are in the roe-on-kelp industry. The only thing that's going to help us is to retire roe-on-kelp and bring the licences back to the original 28 in the quota. Then we have a hope in the market to go ahead. But if we just keep saying, “We're going to retire roe herring,” it helps the roe herring industry; it does not help the roe-on-kelp industry whatsoever.