I just want to go back and remind committee members of a little story. This is a personal thing that involved my family. One of the very first national caucus meetings that I attended outside of Ottawa happened in this lovely community called Charlottetown. My family came with me on that trip, a long time ago. My children were quite small at the time; they're all quite big now, because I've been here a while.
Now, this wouldn't be in the lovely riding of Egmont; it would be in Malpeque. I remember walking down the dock at Cavendish, a short drive from Stanley Bridge where my family was staying. These places would be very familiar to Mr. Morrissey and others at the table.
I booked a little fishing trip, and I took my two boys—if they weren't 7 and 3, they were 8 and 4—and we got on this boat with about a dozen other people. Boy, it sure looked like a lobster fishing boat, because it was.
The captain of the boat took us out on the bay and gave us fishing rods with little pink flies on them. We jigged for some mackerel, and my kids and I had a hoot reeling in a few little mackerel that we subsequently cut up for bait. He turned the motor on, went out a little further, and we jigged for cod. We caught a few cod, we caught a few other fish, some sculpins and a few other things. We had a great time.
In my conversation with the captain of the boat, he said to me that his two trips a day that he makes out there—one in the morning and one in the afternoon—made more money for him taking a few people fishing at $20 or $30 per person for a couple of hours than he netted from his lobster fishery, which was thousands of dollars of input costs, thousands of dollars of fuel costs and thousands of dollars of other costs, which are fine, and of course, the revenue he got from that....
So, I think, Mr. Chair, that it is only fair and reasonable that we go to see what it is exactly that people who live along the coastal communities of our country want. I think this motion will certainly enlighten this committee, and I can't for the life of me figure out why anybody at this table would be uneasy in adopting this motion.