It was only for a year or two. Also, rationalization was supposed to give us more time on the water, not off the water. I'm now down to one third of what I had. That rationalization is not working. It didn't work. To be cut down to one third of what you had back then, when this was the answer to the fishery.... I could debate this a lot. God, I wish I had time because you need to hear a lot of this.
But we were told that this was the way to go. We were told that combining had to be done. We ended up with groundfish licences taken out of the system and crab and shrimp licences left in the system. All we got rid of were boats on the water. The same licences are still out there. There was money wasted for no reason. Everything was done the wrong way.
Today we're in this mess because we were told that we had to do this. I couldn't survive on.... We already had started getting cuts from 12 years ago and down on to 8 years ago, down to a point that I had to buy. I had to rationalize. You took away the buddy-up system. The minister took away the leasing systems. I couldn't get fish any other way, other than to go to a private bank and sign my ass on the line and everything I owned. My grandsons and everybody else who is coming behind me...we're all in debt. We had to. We had no choice.
Today we're here, and it's all because of rationalization and the way the policies came down, and we weren't allowed to do anything else to survive, but only to go to the banks and put ourselves in debt. That was DFO's answer to our problems.