Thank you. I'm glad to have this opportunity.
In regard to what Earle's talking about, in our small communities when we started fishing at our age, it didn't cost anything, any more than to gear up, you know what I'm saying, the boat and a bit of gear. But then, during the moratorium years, we created this thing called core. We made this listing of core fishermen, and with that came IQs.
I got in the fishery for an investment of labour and a bit of gear, but the one coming in behind me now has to go to me or some other licence-holder and say, I want to get in the fishery; you've got 11,000 pounds of crab, it's worth $80,000, and how can I pay for that and make a living off that at the same time?
We've robbed the next generation of a traditional, historic fishery, and I feel that when the government shut down the cod fishery because of mismanagement on the federal government's part in 1992, they didn't do their work. They did a little bit of buyout. They passed out of the TAGS program and the NCARP program. The buyout they did was absolutely wrong. They were just trying to get paper out of the system. They weren't trying to get a system created where it was more evened out. They just took your piece of paper, and your piece of paper; it all came from this one bag here, none out of that bag. So we're left in the same state we were before that.
If we're going to leave something for the next generation to take what we got and carry on at least to some degree a little bit of outport in Newfoundland, then, as Earle said, there's got to be a commitment on all sides of the table, because today around this table I hear a lot of discussion about our problems in the fishery, but the question I have asked from the beginning, and I still ask today, is who's going to fill our shoes? If we fix it for us and we don't fix it for the next generation, we're sort of wasting our time here, aren't we? For 10 or 12 years, it's not worth the headaches. We've got to look further ahead than me.
Thank you.