I can speak to that on two fronts, as a lobster fisher and as a member of the board of directors of the second-largest processing plant on Prince Edward Island. I've been there for 19 years.
We have just finished installing a $1 million holding facility with absolutely no government assistance. You can't get government assistance. Provincially, they hide behind the OCI deal; federally, ACOA won't look at it.
The reason why we installed the holding facility and the reason why anybody would want to have one is it eliminates what we call a glut situation in the fishery, where, at the start of the season, when the catches are high, instead of processing product into low-value product, you can hold your lobster and do it later in the season into high-end product. The trouble with the high-end product is it's very labour-intensive, but it's still worth your while to do it because the return is there. But by not having holding facilities to hold the product, at the start of the season you've got to push it into this product to get it through or it dies in the plant. Holding facilities are very important to the fishery.
It also extends to the area of our workers. Last year, at our plant, we were able to keep 160 plant workers working an additional three weeks by just what we had in our holding facility. The product that we were doing was very labour intensive, but it was going to a niche market in Japan and the returns were very high on it. It was worth your while, because although your labour costs were higher, your return was much higher.
That's the important thing about lobster holding facilities.