Thank you, Mr. McDonald.
In my opening, I did say that we feel that by opening the Fisheries Act and making these changes it gives us an opportunity as well to make some other changes that I think we feel are long overdue. One of those is the owner-operator and fleet separation issue.
When you look at the fishery and how it's structured in our province, you see that today we have about 9,000 harvesters, with 3,000 enterprises fishing from probably some 400 communities and adding a value of $500 million or $600 million per year to our economy. One of the things that fisheries minister Roméo LeBlanc did in the 1970s was to bring in the fleet separation and the owner-operator policy.
For anybody who doesn't understand it, what it really does is keep large companies from owning large portions of our industry. We feel that it's very important. I'll go back to the numbers I just quoted about the number of harvesters and the people and communities affected. It's important to make sure that the licences that are there are maintained by professional fish harvesters in our province and are not out on the open market so that a company can come in, for example, and just consume all these licences.
Just recently, I saw an article out of a Nova Scotia newspaper, I think, about an Asian company that was advertising for lobster licences. This company was looking at our resource in Atlantic Canada in particular as an opportunity to consume these licences and have control of our fishery. One thing the owner-operator policy does is that it takes the control of our fishery and gives it to the people and the communities that were meant to have that control.