As someone who has worked in the plant a lot of the time, I remember when we used to watch all the groundfish being cut in the north. Now we see it being loaded into the back of a semi and trucked out. I've watched all of the halibut that in the old days used to come in on the so-called lottery fishery that would employ us for two months in the freezers and in the fresh fish department at Atlin. Since they've gone to quota systems, that fish now comes in a little bit at a time and is also loaded into the back of a semi and trucked out.
Basically, fish comes in, it's unloaded, and it's gone. There is no further processing of any of those fish that we used to do in the past. I think that's the important thing. So much money is caught up here. I think there is $800 million in B.C. in the value of fish; $400 million of that fish is from the north coast, and we're not seeing anybody benefiting from it in the plants. It's put on the back of a truck and it's gone.
With the adjacency principle, if you had to process some of that fish.... I understand that some of it might not be able to be processed up here, and that's the reality, but we have to be able to process something. We are flexible. We are willing to change. Maybe there will never be another canning facility up here, but we are willing to change to make sure that we can process some of that fish up here. Every time we've made a recommendation to the company, we've been told no.
What do you want to do? Do you just want to sit back and watch all that fish leave here in the north, and coastal communities such as Prince Rupert get wiped out? That's the reality of what could happen. People are going to be forced to leave Prince Rupert to try to find work elsewhere, because there are not a lot of other opportunities up here. People have built their livelihood around processing fish here in the north, and it's being taken away.