Perhaps I can jump in here. I'd like to make a comment.
I think about it this way. To me, the Fisheries Act is the foundation of a house. The integrated fisheries management planning is perhaps a wall or a room. The salmon allocation policy is up in the attic. When the foundation isn't working, what are we going to get out of the rest of it? If we want to be strategic with public money investment and our time and energy, knowing the tensions we will need to go through to arrive at a solution, we have to start with the Fisheries Act.
Stu mentioned integrated fisheries management planning. They're asking first nation rights holders to sit with licensed privilege holders and for us to compromise, but those fishers only have the opportunity to fish at the leisure of the minister's licensing regime. We can't sit there and pretend that's government to government. We need to land at an appropriate place to do that kind of work.
When we talk about resources, we're not here to try to maximize budgets and make the juice match the squeeze. We want the appropriate level of resourcing to do the work that's necessary. Stu mentioned the historical inter-nation and nation-to-nation protocols. These discussions are under way today. These are the understandings we need to arrive at. We need to understand that the relationships between nations have been damaged by Canada. We need the time and resources to revisit and re-envision what they're going to be, finalize them among ourselves and then sit down with government to figure out how we're going to implement them.
This is going to be a little bit of work, you could say, because of the interdependence of first nations on salmon. I'm speaking only of salmon, because that goes across the province. That is where I see opportunity.
This also points to the broader commitments of the federal Crown for reconciliation. When you sit down and make an agreement for whatever industry or whatever project and run into differing views from within one first nation, whether it's hereditary chiefs or elected officials, that is the work that needs to be done. It's governance building by first nations and for first nations, which then allows a much stronger measure of certainty going forward.
It will take resources. Trust me, it's not easy work. We did it internally for six years. It was tense. It was incredibly complicated and we didn't reach the goal. That was after about five or six years of work. We don't have the resources to continue it. This is playing out across British Columbia.