Some participants distributed a table to you. Do you have it? All right.
Last year, the department assessed the biomass at approximately 45,000 tonnes or some 44,000 tonnes. The previous year, the biomass was estimated at approximately 48,000 tonnes. So there was a decline in biomass of approximately 4,000 tonnes from one year to the next. The scientists' figures on pre-recruits, recruitment—it isn't enough simply to verify biomass; you also have to check to see who's entering the fishery and what the new recruitment will be for the following year—was approximately 43 or 47 million specimens for 2009. With all that information, the industry's five or six crab fishermen's associations suggested to the department—since it wanted to reduce the quotas to 19,200 tonnes based on the scientific assessments of recruitment, pre-recruits—that it was also all right to set them at 20,900 tonnes. The difference was only 1,700 tonnes. We said to ourselves that we could reassess the situation the following year.
This year, the scientists have changed all the figures. The pre-recruits from last year no longer represent 47 million specimens, but only 31 million. That's what's happening on the scientists' side. The figures change every month or every six months, and they change constantly. They submit figures, we study them, we have them analyzed. Six months later, we're told that there was a mistake, that it was a cut-and-paste, that the figure shouldn't have been there. That changes all the figures. All that to tell you that, if the department, or the minister, had followed officials' recommendation to set the quotas at 19,200 tonnes, that would have done absolutely nothing to change the present situation. We would be at the same point.