Probably several of us will reply to your question.
In defining volunteer fatigue—I was here for Monday's session and somebody asked about that—what we're talking about is a kind of unique program. You have a number of volunteers, and these aren't paid people in many cases. They're fellow fishermen dealing with the stresses every day of trying to fish themselves and run the harbour operations--generate revenues, deal with fee collection, deal with waste oil, garbage removal, environmental issues--and trying to put together projects and proposals and access sources of funding. They're doing that as volunteers, and they have to answer to their fellow fishermen in the community. And whether it's a harbour with 10 vessels or a harbour with 500, it's the lifeblood of those communities to have that harbour there.
Just the day-to-day stresses of trying to deal with those issues and answering, in some cases, on infrastructure, which they're putting time and effort into—in a lot of cases, volunteer labour—and not being able to explain to the other fellow fishermen that we're asking them to put more dollars into this, when at the same time, they're asking where in the hell is the federal government, it's a federal asset.... So it's day to day, everyday frustrations.
Added to that, there was a real push to form the harbour authority program. Some fishermen would refer to it as their having come with a gun to our heads and saying “Either form a harbour authority or maybe we'll walk away from the harbour.” So it was very successful in forming the harbour authorities. However, one thing that failed in the rush to form them, while they were still forming harbour authorities, is that there weren't a lot of the support services there in the form of training or assistance. You're running a day-to-day operation, no matter the number of boats, and trying to manage that. There's a real recognition of that now, and we're working towards trying to improve that in training, whether it be board development, day-to-day training, safety issues. And there are a lot more items that have come on the table since we took over as harbour authorities--environmental issues, contaminated sites, pollution, waste removal. There are a number of challenges facing us, but we're not prepared to give up on it, that's for sure.
I'll ask any of my other colleagues here to jump in on the volunteer fatigue issue as well.