In the communities that I work for, many of them have lots of young people who are interested in engaging in the fishing business and the community fishing enterprises. One of the challenges is the cost of the vessel.
There's also opportunity and the fact that they need to learn and relearn some of these skills, just like they do on the east coast, where they're re-engaging and participating in commercial fisheries. They have done it on a smaller scale locally.
One of the shifts that's happening is the shifting toward more community-based fishing for indigenous people and to the smaller scale, with smaller vessels and multiple species. We've been involved in some of that. In one of the communities I work for, Port Alberni, they have hundreds of fishermen in their community who are from age 15 to 90. They're participating in owner-operator fishing. The nation has the licence access and the community members benefit wholly from the opportunity. The nation doesn't get any revenue from the fishery.
As an example, to Mike's earlier question, you have fishermen in that community who are going to generate $800,000 in a chinook opening in one night in August. That $800,000 is then going to turn into almost $8 million to that community, because those people are going to spend that money around and around and around in that community. They spend it all there. They don't take it somewhere else. They don't live in Vancouver. They live in Port Alberni, a community of 25,000 people, where a shot of $8 million into that economy's arm in one night makes a huge difference.
In those communities, the mayors and all the people understand the wealth that stays there from those fishermen. Those small-scale opportunities are what we need to build on here. That's what we're fighting for here. It's for those fishermen to have an opportunity to keep that money and grow the economy where they live.