I differ on that strongly, because it is all about lobster. We have made a lot of changes and brought about a lot of things in our industry—as I said to you, our seasons, our traps, our controls that we have in there, escape mechanisms, a return of our berried females. All those things are protecting our industry. I would suggest that you remember, over all this effort you're talking about, that we are at a 100-year high. We haven't decreased. We have maintained and kept going up until just very recently. There is a little anomaly at the top. I'm not sure if it's a 96- or 97-year high right now.
We are looking at that right now. First of all, we think it is no wisdom at all to say we're going to maintain at a 100-year high, but we're looking at it and saying we should be able to keep it at 65-year to 75-year highs. When things start to drop down below this, some major things are going to kick into place that will put more lobsters in the water and give us protection.
As far as the effort is concerned, we're still at the same number of traps. Our boats have increased in size, but that just enables us to fish in areas—so that you'll understand, the collapse in the groundfish, the cod fish, has enabled our lobsters to move out and spread out over a greater area. We fish an area, give or take a little bit, of about 22,000 square kilometres, up to 50 miles from the headland. That is area 34. We're bound on the outside by area 41, in which Mr. MacDonald's company owns the eight licences. By the way, that's the same stock they fish, and they do a selective fishery on our stock outside of what they fish on St. Georges Bay. What's on Georges is understood to be a different population, but inside of that it is primary LFA 34. It's not a fishery out of control, and with FRCC and their situation, they're dealing with lobster in eastern Canada. The difficulty is, when you leave area 34 and go to the other side of the province, the strait and P.E.I. and those areas, it's totally a different fishery. One blanket doesn't cover all.
I understand where they're coming from, what they're writing, but concerning a quota system, we strongly frown on that because a quota system puts people out of work. It's putting enterprises out of work. Communities ease out because it ends up in the hands of a very select few. On the offshore fishery there used to be a lot of independent licences, and now it's all owned by one company.