Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for coming, gentlemen. It's a very interesting topic, and I think you've enlightened us already.
Mr. Chapman, you talked about a kind of ballooning in 1997. That was the year I guess Minister Mifflin announced a 57% increase in the total allowable catch for northern shrimp. At that time he issued it by a press release, and put in the four principles. Just help me understand your view on those principles, because I think one could make the point that they're contradictory.
The first was that conservation was paramount, which of course makes some sense. The second was that the viability of the existing enterprises would not be jeopardized by this new larger allocation, and that in all cases they would retain their 1996 allocation and wouldn't go below that. The third was that there would be no permanent increase in harvesting capacity and that participation by new entrants would be temporary; they used those words. The fourth, though, is the interesting one, as I think has been referred to here: that adjacency would be respected.
I mean, how would all of those happen at the same time? Could it be argued that the way to resolve that is the way in fact I think it was resolved, and the way I think the stakeholders understood it would be—namely, to use the principle of adjacency when the allocations were going up, so that the majority of the increased allocation would go to, in this case, the inshore fleet because of that adjacency principle, and in fact to follow the same trajectory on the way down? Is it reasonable to see that this was the way it was originally intended to be understood and implemented?