We are one of the ones who are holding out from paying science. As Bernie said, why should we pay for science? When we do find extra crab, we don't get the agreement and the amount of crab we're entitled to. We worked hard for this management plan. Back in 1998, when we first were temporaries and shared on crab, we were mandated to go at least 80 miles from shore. We did the science work. We proved the crab were out there. This led to an increase in TAC. We've done this every year. As Nellie said, we sat around the table and bit and barked at each other. DFO ministers had enough of that and they mandated the independent panel. There was acceptance of the recommendations, the management plan was put in place, and we abided by it for four full seasons. We never went back to any of the ministers, whether Liberal or Tory. We never approached them to ask them to change the management plan sharing formula. We lived with it. We prayed every night that the TAC would surpass 9,700 tonnes. In 2009 our prayers were answered. The only thing is that DFO didn't deliver on them.
I know the minister gets most of the flak and the black eyes from this. But DFO officials in Halifax are the key boys. They're the ones who should have their knuckles rapped on this. The minister can only take advice from her advisors and she follows that advice and believes in those advisors. The sad thing is that some of these advisors aren't to be trusted. We well know what happened here. Gus van Helvoort wrote a personal note and it resulted in this. I would say they pored through this document for months and months and came up with the “equal”, hoping that we wouldn't hold on to documents, that we would just discard them because we had a management plan and, hey, we were trusting that DFO would give us our 50-50 if and when the day happened. We held on. We held on to all notes. We held on to every document. As I stated earlier, Gus van Helvoort tried to convince me that DFO misinterpreted its own documents along with statements that, oh, we agreed to give our crab away. How stupid would we be? If we lobbied to get crab, are we going to give it up easily?
In e-mails between, as I stated, Mike Eagles of DFO, Gus van Helvoort of DFO, Gordon MacDonald of the permanent fleet, and Fred, who is here today, it clearly shows that back in April of 2005, through the communication back and forth, they understood that 50-50. There was no talk about the 50-50. The only thing they were worried about was why the Millbrook 250-tonne allocation was tucked into the CFA 23 when it shouldn't have been there. It was just words twisted around. They did not question the 60-40 or 50-50. They were accepting, but they were also praying that it would never go over the 9,700 tonnes.