Fisheries management today, within a conservation regime, is a zero-sum game. If new entrants come into the industry or new fishing effort is brought into the industry, then effort has to be taken out—and maybe people are going to have to be taken out—somewhere else.
Much of the anxiety and the reaction we are seeing happening at the community level right now is because there is no clear direction on that; there's no clear policy or understanding of how this is going to be managed. If we're going to maintain conservation and bring a whole new set of actors into the industry, what is the process for it to take place?
In 1999, in the initial Marshall process, the process was that licences were purchased from retiring harvesters and transferred into first nations communities. People thus understood, as things settled out, how it was going to happen and that the net effect was going to be neutral or beneficial.
In the current environment there is no clear direction or understanding. There's a great deal of rumour and concern about an aggressively expanding new fishery, and no understanding at all about how it's going to take place without severe impacts upon people who are caught in the backlash from it.
That's the lack of current policy and direction that I think needs to be addressed as a priority.