Merci.
The independent panel report came out in 2005, just prior to the fishing season. The recommendation on the 50-50 was not accepted by the minister. There were a series of meetings that were held after that to discuss how that was going to be implemented. The eventual recommendation was the 50-50, as discussed.
The interpretation of a reasonable man, though, is an interesting point. I consider myself to be reasonable, and I know other people who consider themselves to be reasonable, who completely misunderstood the concept of the trigger value, in the sense that we thought the 60-40 was actually a threshold and not a trigger.
The subtlety is in the word and what it means. A trigger, like a gun, goes off and shoots you in the head. The threshold, on the other hand, applies when you're beyond that level and it retracts when you're not. Having come from a series of thresholds and adjustments, we thought it was something that was in place when you were beyond that level--in other words, in times of excess.
This was implemented in the management plan, 2007-11, which I see some people have on the table. The management plan was not available to us until the 2008 advisory meeting, which was the first time we recognized some kind of problem.
So the panel report was in 2005. I mean, I fish for a living--that's what I do--and we don't hover over documents. We get an understanding of what we think it means and we go on.
When we saw it in the integrated fisheries and management plan in the March meeting of 2008, we recognized there was an interpretation problem, that it was trigger, not a threshold. At that point we started asking questions for clarification. We asked for clarity on what it meant, whether it was the trigger or the threshold. We spoke again....
A lot has been made about the Joan Reid letter that said if we hit this level this is going to implement this. Absolutely. I mean, with the minister's report Mr. Byrne was talking about, his announcement, there was clarity in what they intended to do; we just misunderstood it. We misunderstood it because we didn't get the fact that it was a threshold versus a trigger. But as soon as we did, again, we presented cases, and we made recommendations and spoke publicly. We went into the advisory meetings. We talked openly. There hasn't been anything done behind closed doors.
Again, with the different things that the panel took into account, it had a very difficult job. The bulk of the recommendations were implemented. Whether it was 50-50 or 60-40 is an interesting problem. It has a series of dilemmas attached to it, and ultimately it's the reason it wasn't directly accepted at the beginning.
The problem doesn't change. But what has changed is that the economic value of snow crab in the 2004 season was over $3 a pound. We put a price of $2.50 in our economic analysis to the panel, which was scoffed at because it was never going to go below that. We haven't seen $2.50 since. I mean, you add an economic crisis and the rest, and beyond that you've got resource fluctuations; you have economic fluctuations. You can't just give your quota away for free and then say you can be viable by buying it back. In low times you don't have the money, and in high times, again, it's expensive. The value goes up and the value goes down.
We misunderstood trigger versus threshold. We didn't get the IFMP until three years from this report. I mean, even this meeting here today is on a decision that was made over a year ago. We're in the second fishery from there. Sometimes it just takes time to get down to what's going on. It doesn't happen overnight.