Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
And thank you to Colin MacDonald, our witness, for providing a no-punches description of some of the concerns your industry has.
Before I begin, I do want to say a special thank you for the great welcome our colleague Greg has given us and the contribution he has made on this committee as we investigate this issue.
Mr. MacDonald, you gave a pretty good overview of some of the concerns you have, but there is an 800-pound gorilla that you didn't bring into this room, and that's the news that Clearwater recently wrote down $102 million on its balance sheets from losses last year. What you didn't talk about was Clearwater's relationship with Icelandic foreign banks, your financing structure, and those financial aspects that directly impact your particular business.
As I listened to your presentation...the majority of the concerns facing Clearwater in the lobster industry stem back to 100 years ago. If I am reading correctly between the lines, you were saying that it really has to do with the relationship between the fleet separation, that harvesters and processors ne'er shall meet. Is it Clearwater's ambition to change the structure of this industry to allow integration of the processor with the harvester so that Clearwater becomes more of a harvesting entity, plus a marketing entity?
Can you comment on that $102 million writedown that Clearwater presumably had, and the impact that has on the company? Specifically, was there any contributing factor from the fact that the banks you received your financing from were not Canadian--they were Icelandic, as I understand it--and that those Icelandic banks went into receivership?