No. From the time I was little I can remember—I'm talking mostly about in our wharf—we used to have a lot of fish draggers. Right now fewer than a handful are left. They're all owned by companies. We had all kinds of scallopers. It's the same thing: they're all owned by companies.
District 34 is one of the biggest independent fisheries left. We are seeing it going down the road. It's going down every day. We're losing it.
Where I'm coming from is when the Donald Marshall decision came down, the price of gear went up, and some guys who had fish draggers and quota sold them to the government to accommodate the natives in our fishery. What happened there, for a tax break they bought into our fishery. So with this trust agreement, when 51% of our fishery is owned by companies, we're done. When we get to the table--you have it on the west coast--we won't have a word to say. Now we're still independent fishermen and we still can go to the table and negotiate and have a fair deal, but if the licences keep going into these hands, which should be controlled and still is not, we're going down the drain fast.
For us in southwest Nova, it's really important. That is our backbone right now in the industry, and that's why I'm speaking for owner-operators. I'm a straight believer in owner-operators. At the beginning it was supposed to be that if you sold something to the native fishery, you were buying out of the fishery. You were gone. But that wasn't true, because they came into our fishery.
The way these trust agreements are going right now, we won't be independent too much longer. We can see it going down day by day.