We're part of the Ontario Commercial Fisheries' Association, which actually has some licences that go across the Quebec border. Fishermen from Quebec come to our annual meetings.
I believe you have 16 licences to harvest glass eels, 14-centimetre eels, from the Quebec border down towards the east coast. I don't know if Mr. Simms would know about fishing the glass eels down there, since he's an east coaster; Mr. Manning might. We're not allowed to catch eels now because they're not available for us as a species to harvest.
The number of fishermen in the area continues to go down. A lot of people are getting too old, die off, or just plain retire. It's pretty hard to get somebody to work on a boat when you tell them you'll give them a percentage of anywhere from zero to whatever. You might make money or it might cost you money.
The number of fishermen in this area is probably down by 400% or 500% from what it was even 20 years ago. The government did some buyouts in the eighties and bought up a bunch of licences, which took more fishermen out of it. We're down to one buyer right now in the area. He has a licensed export-import processing plant. Sometimes he'll have as few as 10 employees, and sometimes he'll run three shifts with as many as 100. So the fishing industry in this area goes up and down quite a bit, as to how many are involved.
Right now out of Point Traverse we have about six full-time commercial fishing licences being fished regularly. About another 20 belong to people who are too old to go out any more. They can't get young people to go out on the boats and help them. So we are a dying breed around here.
You can see that our council and our mayor don't even think we exist any more. So it's pretty hard to say how many are actually involved in commercial fishing. I think there are about 60 licences, and they are pretty well family-type licences. There might be 10 people from one family fishing on that one licence, so it's pretty hard for anybody to know just how many of us there are.