Thank you very much.
It's nice seeing you again. You were an old neighbour of mine on P.E.I. Anyway, I'm one of the Jameses of the Church Road.
Saying that, I applaud anyone who would like to come onside with this new species. This is a new fishery. It's not very often that we get an opportunity to open a new fishery in Canada. These fish have gone by our shores long before any of us walked on this earth. To this point, no one has ever touched them because they're not really desirable eating fish. But it's not the idea of eating the fish; it's the idea of the catching of these fish. People go south, to Mexico, Hawaii, and down to the tip of the Baja for these large pelagics. Anywhere at all these fish are found in numbers, you will find there is a huge recreation-based fishery.
I suggest that this certainly is a real, 100% possibility for us here in Nova Scotia. It's an untouched industry. It's never been touched, so the fish are still there, other than the fish that are being caught as bycatch on the longline fleet. They're certainly not targeting those species. It just happens that they're catching these species in the area where they fish. To me, that is not an unattainable area to reach from Nova Scotia—and that's from the Canso Causeway, down as far as Liverpool, or whatever, or Yarmouth, because it's even closer to the Gulf Stream in these areas than Halifax is. But Halifax has such a big base of hotels, restaurants, and so on; it's the main city for the province. It certainly would be a good spot, with all the yacht clubs and so on, to run such a fishery or start an expanded marine fishery from here.
The upside is that it would be not millions but billions of dollars to this province. That is what it really means. The recreational fishery, as everyone well knows, is certainly in the billions. It's not in the millions. It's billions of dollars to other countries, and we can have the same thing here. We're just not doing it.
Getting back to your comment on the recreational tuna, that is something that was never allowed. We were the first consortium of people to apply for such a licence. As I told you, it took about a year and a half, through the ALPAC and all those organizations, to have it approved. It was based upon it being a tournament to bring in other countries and promote our country, promote our fishing, and so on. It was a marriage of the commercial fleet and the recreational fleet, because we also need the commercial guides. They have the boats, the will, the rods, where a lot of the recreational people do not. Since the conception of this tournament in 1998, there are a lot of recreational boats here in the city, and other places through the province, that also have these rods and reels, and are getting quite good at it. We promote that as a mainstay, and we look forward to adding to that with these new species.
I know it's something that no one's ever discussed. I've thought long about this meeting, and it is probably the most important thing to our province: to reach out and to try, even with an exploratory licence through Fisheries and Oceans, and of course with scientists. Without them, you're nothing. You need everyone together as a whole, and you need to explore this even if it's a year or two years of an experimental thing, to actually see what numbers are going to be there, at what times of the year. We may look at opening a licence for that. There's work to be done, but I'm throwing it on the table because it is a very viable industry, and it's something that Canada has not....
Canada really has salmon on both coasts, and some halibut. That's another thing that also could be catch-and-release. Sport fishermen do not care about killing animals. They care about catching and releasing them for the greater whole. The thing is, we support that. We just want to be on the water and to have the opportunity to catch these wonderful species and to release them live so they can come back with others.
