We have been speaking to the provincial government. It believes that capital should be unfettered, and therefore it believes that if Jim Pattison can make more money by transferring that fish to his non-union plant in Vancouver or China or the Philippines or Vietnam, it is the unfettered right of capital to be able to do so.
We've expressed to the provincial government that instead of paying welfare to a bunch of first nations people who used to work and make enough money to provide for their families, they would be better off negotiating adjacency with fish plants. We know that we will never be able to process every last fish that comes in, but we think that we should be able to process a good deal of it to keep our workers employed at Canadian Fishing.
The reason we're asking the federal government to do this is that when the federal Liberals were elected, mandate letters went out that said that they're supposed to have a look at social concerns, not just economic concerns, and consequently we're here talking to a committee dominated, we hope, by members thinking along those lines.
We know that the position of the federal government is that it can't deal with fish plants because they are provincial. We believe your responsibility is to talk to the provincial government and say we need to solve this problem together.