For sure we've got too much debt chasing too few fish. I guess what we have—and it's not a numbers game, in my mind—is a combination of a demographic profile, an age profile of the fishing fleet of people nearing retirement age with a heavy overall debt burden. Are we going to have any kind of a fishery in our coastal communities in the future, and if so, what shape is it going to take?
For that to happen there are two choices. Either we'll have an organized licensed buyout program in some fashion, or a rationalization program with shared industry and public funds to execute it in some kind of an organized manner, or we'll have rationalization by bankruptcy. The choice is as blunt as that, where people will be forced out of business because the bills are stacking up and the revenue is not matching that. In so many cases the pie is being divided into so few pieces, as Ray indicated earlier.
The provincial government has offered to cost-share a program with the federal government. We have offered, on behalf of our members, to have an industry-federal-provincial cost-shared arrangement. We've had a proposal on lobster in for months for an industry-federal-provincial cost-shared rationalization program that could become, I think, a model for other fisheries, if it works. But the federal government to date has been the missing party at the table.
Just briefly, if I could, on the marketing, I support the thrust of the comments Trevor made earlier on marketing. It is something that's being aggressively pursued at the provincial level under the restructuring discussions that are going on here, and something that's desperately needed because we haven't had nearly the attention to marketing and promotion that we should have.