Thank you very much.
Thank you to the officials from the department.
If members of this committee understand one thing, it's just how complicated the decisions are that need to be made around management in your department. In this particular circumstance, it seems to me that the evidence we've been hearing is that people recognize that there's been a change in the resource and that there needs to be a response to it. I think everybody acknowledges that.
There certainly has been some question as to whether there's enough science being done, but people don't seem to be arguing about that. They're saying, let's try to resolve this question of sharing what is there at this particular point and then add in more work down the road, in terms of better science or giving you better or more tools to allow you to do your work.
The issue is the question of sharing. I want to ask one question and then I'm going to pass it on to my colleague; we have a few minutes. It's the way the LIFO policy appears to come in. The Ernst & Young report, in their review of 2012, observed that the definition of LIFO appears to have evolved over time—this is something that they reported they had heard from a number of representatives, and it was again cited by the all-party committee that was here earlier—that the change in definition of LIFO from 2003 to 2007 was not presented to stakeholders at the Northern Shrimp Advisory Committee meeting and was made without consultation. The principles that were established in 1997 resulted after a fair bit of consultation with the industry.
But then the LIFO policy came in. Everything before 2007 was about temporary licences, and then—you, Mr. Bevan, used the word “permanent”, though I know it says “regular licences” in the document—people thought they were in. And they were, I would suggest, equal participants in the industry.
I want to ask you to comment on this: that while some observers may suggest that it was clear when LIFO came in what it meant, there were many people who, in some of the documents we have read, don't indicate that there was that clarity.
Even so, are you suggesting that the policy is, in effect, written in stone? If we discover that it was presented and that there was full consultation and everybody understood the rules of the game and so on and that here we are seven or eight years later and circumstances have changed, and yet regardless we have to follow that policy, would you not agree, given what we heard from our guests earlier, that now is a good time for us to review how it is that we're going to respond, from a sharing point of view?