Quite often when you get into the middle of something, you become part of it. You become conscripted by thinking that you're making some progress. You may get too close to an issue and think you're making progress when you're not really making progress.
That's part of the problem. Quite often bureaucrats get caught up in process. Process becomes something that is inherently valuable, when of course process quite often doesn't achieve an awful lot.
My sense is that there's a real need to step back and see what is really happening. We can create this very elaborate Byzantine organization in NAFO and we can pretend that it doesn't work, and you'd get some satisfaction by creating, elaborating, making this great artificial structure, making it look elegant, and using it as an opportunity to network with people in the international arena, but people who are operating out of Ottawa in the international arena are not close to what's happening on the ground or in the water in places like Newfoundland, and they don't necessarily see the enormous damage taking place. We need to look at what's happened to our province over the last 20 years: we've lost 80,000 people; we've gone from 590,000 down to close to 500,000. We've got a devastating depopulation of rural Newfoundland.
Quite often there's a tendency for people who are operating out of the centre to be blind to the real impact on the people who are suffering and to be concerned too much with process. Governments today are very much focused on process. I suspect that our colleagues in Ottawa, not only in DFO but also in many other agencies, are preoccupied with process, and I think one really needs to look at what's happening on the ground. One needs to make a distinction between what's happening on paper and what's happening on the ground.