Mr. Donnelly, I'll go back to your comments and Mr. Blais' comments.
If we want to have a future industry, a very successful industry, it all comes back to what we're talking about here today: the return for the product. We have the richest fishing grounds in the world right off our shores, all encompassing Atlantic Canada, southern gulf, all the Labrador coast. We have a resource with unlimited potential. With any occupation, you have to get paid a good salary, a good return for the fruits of your labour. This is what this symposium here today is all about: receiving a higher return for your product.
We have a huge resource out there. If we can market and channel those returns back to the stakeholders in the industry, then my two boys, nine years old and five years old, can have a future in this industry. But if we continue to go down the path of the mentality we've always done, from say the 1960s until now in the new millennium, where it's all based on volume, it's all based on a load-and-go mentality instead of maximizing the benefit there.... We just look at the northern shrimp resource. Right now we've experienced a cut of approximately 28%. We fished that resource the same as we fished the groundfish--the cod and the turbot and the flounder and the halibut--in the same manner, a load-and-go mentality, low volume.
If Minister Jackman were here this morning, he would be talking about combining quotas. Yes, combining quotas is great, but if you're not receiving the maximum return for that product, then that amount of quota is useless. In the last seven to eight years, we've landed annually in excess of a million pounds of shrimp. We've kept six to eight men employed for six to seven months of the year, our fishing season. What do we have to show for it? You're making a meagre wage, taking part in the most dangerous occupation in Canada. When crew members, enterprise owners, skippers untie that vessel, you're putting your life on the line. Why would a young person want to engage in an industry where you're taking such risk, such uncertainty, without getting a return? It all comes back to getting the maximized value for that high-end food product we are distributing throughout this world.