I think Mr. Gardner has misinterpreted what has gone on, even in the distribution.
The licences were created equal, but the quota shareholders haven't been punished. If there were 22 quota shareholders on one licence and 14 on the other, the licences were adjusted to meet that. It was based on the concept that 16 quota shareholders would equal one permanent fleet licence. So if there were 16 licences, they would be identical to a traditional licence. If there were 14 it would mean two units less or two units more, but they would be equally distributed because there are 16 shares to a licence for the number of licences that are there.
On how they're bantered about--some may have 22 and some may have 14--you just do the math. It all works out and everybody gets an equal share. There is no more for one particular person because they're bound to one group, or less for another.
The resource is up. It's at its highest level now, and that's great. We do our best through science to manage that. Unfortunately, we don't have any management capabilities over the economic value.
In the panel they were talking about a $3 price. Currently the shore price is around $1.45 here, and I think it's $1.35 in Newfoundland. That's less than half of what the value was back then. You can do the math any way you want, but if you catch twice as much fish and get half the money for it, you're at the same level.
The problem is, you have to average all of these things. There are three different things. You have to contend with the biomass, the economics, and the government, which can come along and say “You're making too much. We'll take it away.” But they're never really there when you're not making enough. Then they tell you, “You can just rationalize. You can just get together with your friends.”
Further to one of the questions that Mr. Blais asked earlier, our industry is over capacity. That has always been an issue in any kind of fishery, because when you have too much capacity, not enough fish, and too many fishermen there is a problem. When your economic viability starts to go south, at the end of the day nobody wants to leave. I was talking earlier about the temporaries who were looking at elimination from the fishery because the stock was going down and they didn't want to leave. So you do whatever you have to do. It doesn't matter about the level of C and P, policing, or whatever. If your choice is not feeding your family or giving up fishing, you take whatever you can until the bitter end.
If ultimately in your next step you're headed to the gulf, what they're facing right now is based on a wholesale push-back against new access to their fishery. They felt they were not stewards of their resource. The value of the resource was not theirs and it was going to be given away, so they fought tooth and nail against absolutely everything. They took a different approach from what we did, and they're in a different place from where we are. They used to have an excellent relationship with the scientists from the gulf, and now they don't.
We have to face the cycles up and down, as you've said. But we have to put away money, pay down debt, and get things prepared, because we know full well the resource is going to decline whether we like it or not. We have no control over the economic value. It has not been good in the last five years, and it doesn't have any prognosis of getting any better.
So those are factors that the minister took into consideration as well. She changed what former minister Regan had said, but Minister Regan was making his best decision based on the information available. It's five years later now. There is more information available and more understanding, and things change.
Talking about an integrated fisheries management plan--the bible--and that we need to follow this and listen, in 2004 they threw out the integrated fisheries management plan. The area 23 fleet and the aboriginal participants went to a judicial review because they didn't use the IFMP of the day. At the end of the day, the court said this was just a policy document, guidance, not something that needed to be held to. You cannot fetter the minister's discretion, because as the information becomes available they need to have the opportunity to make the best decisions based on the best information.
Things have changed. These things needed to be factored into consideration, and they were.