Well, clearly, some of the broader issues that were related to the budget in terms of access to capital, etc., are going to be available for people in this industry in terms of the buyers and the processors, etc. They can make representations to and proposals on how to get access to that. We will have the community adjustment funds and we'll see what the conditions are on those and how those could be used in this area.
Last year in the fall, when things started to unravel the way they did in terms of the economy, we did start discussions with the lobster fishing areas on how they might cut their costs and how they might slow down the fishery so they wouldn't glut the market, and how they could take advantage of the fact that the retail market seemed to be taking up a bit of the slack left by the food service market, which was very important in this particular fishery. We didn't get a good uptake on that. Notwithstanding, we're still going to try to pursue that because of the fact that, as you pointed out, in the next eight weeks or so--or perhaps even less--this problem is upon us.
One thing we don't want to do is to have too much supply come in too quickly, overload the capacity, and then have people put in the position where they can't get access to buy it and they can't move their product quickly enough to feed the need anticipated by the fishermen. So if it could be slowed down by voluntary measures, by fishermen in the area in conjunction with the processing plants, that would at least help to avoid a situation where people run out of the capital that they have. The working capital may be less than last year, and they need to be able to make better use of it and they may need to try to move product.
But I am not going to sugar-coat this, we are facing a very serious potential problem in terms of the people who buy the lobster in the United States having access to capital, the people who buy it in other markets having access to capital, and the ability of the Canadian industry to purchase, process, and then go and move it to market as they traditionally have. Those are not necessarily going to be activities that can unfold without having big impacts and we are open to discussions with the industry on how we might change some of the management as these fisheries open up in another month or so.