Your regional area manager for eastern Nova Scotia, Ms. Joan Reid, weighed in on this as well. On February 18, 2009, just a month before you tore up the contract, she wrote to every crabber in area 23 and 24. Here's exactly what she said: “It's expected that due to the strong recruitment, a TAC exceeding 9,700 tonnes” --which is the threshold of the contract--“may be approved in 2009, thus triggering the permanent fifty-fifty sharing arrangement recommended by the advisory panel on access and allocation in 2005. No other management measures, including quota transfers, will be affected by this.”
Your own area manager wrote to every crabber a month before you tore up the contract, saying the contract stands, we're going to implement it, and the licence commissions will actually implement the contract. You decided instead, as of 2010, to assign a 4,400-tonne quota to the traditional and aboriginal fleet, and the core company fleet receives just 2,700. The contract says 3,575 tonnes, approximately, per fleet.
Madam Minister, in the former versions of the Fisheries Act that you tabled, you said a contract is a contract is a contract, and the statute would protect those contracts. You're now telling us other circumstances now suggest we really shouldn't necessarily have to abide by contracts. You're making a very convincing argument that you really don't believe in the Fisheries Act that was tabled.
He had granted a licence to Tim Rhyno and you upheld that decision, even though it was recommended by the advisory panel that you not do that. There was a contract in place with area 23 and 24 crabbers, signed by another minister. You said, I don't think I'm going to honour that contract.
The new Fisheries Act, as I understand it, was supposed to actually provide guarantees, statutory guarantees, that the fisheries minister shouldn't be able to do that and couldn't do that. You're making a very convincing case that that's not necessarily the way to go.