Yes, it is from my perspective. This was really a bomb. As a country, we had to react quickly. It was uncharted territory.
I'm not criticizing the government. The government and the department have been doing a tremendous amount of work, as far as I'm concerned. We're still feeling our way through this. It doesn't mean they're right all the time, but I am not criticizing the attempts the Government of Canada has made to try to address the issue. On the contrary, I applaud it.
Having said that, we need to further our work. We need to perfect it and make sure we continue to do this. For example, there was the question of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch recommending that Americans stop buying snow crab and lobsters. How ridiculous is that? The government took a pretty good stand. I thought it was okay, but we need to be able to do more on that level.
We, as processors, were quite involved. I didn't get a chance to talk about this, but I'm really impressed with the fisheries improvement program we have. We were certified as an industry with MSC—Marine Stewardship Council—and because of the whale entanglement, our MSC was taken away from us. A lot of our buyers were saying that, if we are not certified MSC anymore, they're not sure they can buy our product. This is what's happening.
Now we're taking steps by including the fishermen, working with government, working with NGOs including the New England Aquarium, and working with our buyers. We've created this group on this project called the fisheries improvement project, so we can return to our MSC certification.
This is tremendous coordination, so I'm not knocking anybody. I'm just saying that this is evolving very fast. DFO needs to do more to make sure its in sync with how fast this is going in terms of ropeless technology.