One of the greatest things that I've seen was when I moved up to Prince Rupert. I was working with the area A monitoring program with Ecotrust Canada. This was a monitoring program. Area A in the crab fishery has voluntarily.... At the start, they asked to have the camera and the monitoring programs put in place. They were the driving force behind that, because they knew that it was the way forward.
What I've seen and what I think it going to be detrimental to something that's going to be so great coming forward is that there's a lack of understanding about the system and still a really negative perception in attitude towards fishermen. Something that I saw that was causing so much extra work and creating a lot of frustration was that DFO wasn't understanding how the monitoring system applied to fishermen, and they were getting warning letters just for having a single missed scan on a buoy, when that is great. You know, the poor fellows were getting warning letters, and the system was being used in a negative way, and I think lots of other people heard about that, and that created a lot of confusion and negativity around monitoring.
I think the way forward with monitoring is to help people who are working in enforcement, in management, and in regulation to understand what it is to be a commercial fishermen, the positive experience that it is, and who these people are. I think that will save so much time and taxpayers' money and create really resilient fisheries.