I'll make a couple of quick statements, and then Monsieur Mallet will take over.
For me, in order to move forward in the future and come up with a balanced approach to be able to coexist with these animals, where we can have the right whales survive and the fishery survive, we need to take a step back. We need to have an honest look at 2017 and at what actually took place that led to such a horrific summer.
I am a fisherman, and from a fisherman's standpoint, we're out there for one species. It is our target species. We're not there to harm any other species. I can tell you that there was quite a sickening feeling within the industry to know that we had played a part in the deaths of those whales, but the approach for 2018 was an overreaction without really having an honest discussion about what went wrong.
That leads me to the fear that if we don't know what went wrong in 2017, how are we going to know what went right in 2018? How are we going to be able to develop a balanced approach to move forward from there? These are some of the things we need to see.
At the end of the day, as I said before, we want to be able to coexist with these animals. We know we can, especially from a lobster point of view, in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence. When you look at the history, we have had zero instances of encounters with these animals. We've had zero instances of entanglement in the lobster fishery in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence. We got slapped with a whole bunch of restrictions this spring, and some are in our fall fisheries, on which we were not consulted. We were not even informed until two weeks before our fishery started that we were getting these. We feel they were unjustified.
I'll turn it over to Mr. Mallet to continue.