Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to our guests for being here. Your comments have echoed some fairly deep-rooted suspicions we've had.
Just to clarify, we made the point in some of our earlier studies and will continue to make the point that relying on traditional knowledge does not confine itself to indigenous fishers. It means everybody who's on the water who knows something.
I'll also reflect that very often we've heard about the difficulties people have in dealing with the DFO and about how closed they are to outside information, whereas I think our orientation has been to see more citizen science. Given that basically we're dealing more and more, as we've heard from our west coast colleagues.... These aren't fishers from 50 years ago; these are scientists. These are people who have high education and know things and whose resource is being wasted because the doors have been closed to them. We want to open those doors.
In our conversations with the minister this morning, we brought up the owner-operator issue. Like you, I'm from the west coast, and I've often wondered how it is that we got to the situation there, when so much effort is being made to preserve the economic and social benefits of the owner-operator situation on the east coast. My colleagues can tell you that even there it's under stress and threat.
The minister said that it's a permissive environment or regime. If enough people want it, it's possible to get it on the west coast. The challenge to you is thus to start thinking about how that transition could be made.
An independent fisher on the west coast of Vancouver Island was telling me about fishing for halibut. He was getting, and the numbers may not be absolutely correct, $9 a pound, but he was paying $7 a pound in rent.
Mr. Lawson, is that pretty typical? I'll ask all of you. What percentage of the actual revenue are you able to keep after you pay rent to God knows who?