Coming from Nova Scotia, I can appreciate the volunteerism of it all. I appreciate the fact that when harbour authorities started out, like with airport authorities, there was a lot of caution and people putting their backs against the wall about this. Now we have found, throughout the years, that it's actually been quite successful.
One of the concerns I see...and just help me out if this is happening. We were in Carbonear this morning and the gentleman talked to us about a new breakwater. We were in Port de Grave and we talked about new docking facilities. We'll be in other areas where they will talk about dredging. All of this costs money. In many ways, if you have 68 authorities, you have 68 requests, and in some cases you may have two or three requests per harbour. So for someone like Gary, who advises the minister or advises MPs, or whoever, eventually you're going to have to make a choice of who gets what.
The reason I ask the question, do you get together.... Does anyone ever say, “Okay, Carbonear, we'll push for you guys for this year and maybe you can help us push next year for ours”? I'm not trying to downplay the importance of what you require for your particular authority, because you're right, they're like highways in Ontario and they're like anything else: they're very important to your businesses. But I can see that with all these requests going in individually, it would be quite difficult for DFO to make a decision based on funding criteria.
So do you get together in that regard to help each other out? You certainly don't want to be at each other's throats. I know you get along here quite well.