Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the officials for being here today.
As you can probably sense from the line of questioning, we're frustrated, because we're hearing two very different things. Where is our middle ground here? Where can we find it? We have fishers who appeared before this committee and said that they were not consulted, that it makes no sense to them why they can't fish, and that if they have a quota, what difference the size of the boat makes.
I know that Ms. Perry said something like might be a gap. I'm sorry, but I'm not understanding how there could be a gap. If you are allowed to fish a certain amount, what difference does it make what size of boat you have?
Besides that, I'm going to go to another question, but I do want to come back to that in terms of how we solve this problem, because it is a problem.
Mr. Waddell, I'm going to ask you this question. Maybe somebody else can chime in if you're the wrong person. We had one of the fishers say that he has a 29-foot 11-inch boat. He goes further out than he used to. He would like a larger boat for safety reasons, yet we had someone from FFAW say that the size of the boat does not matter in terms of safety, that it doesn't matter how far out you go: you can go out in a 29-foot boat and be safe to the 200-mile limit.
Do you agree with that? Do you agree that the size of the boat has no bearing on safety?