Thank you very much, Chair.
Again, there's always this challenge of talking about redfish and lobster at the same time. I don't know if they're really good to be together.
To what Mr. Cormier had to say, there are a number of bigger boats. They're not huge boats. I know there's been a range from 55 feet to 100 feet in some cases, from companies like Scotia Harvest and Mersey to Belle Baie and Caramer, which are all in our ridings. They're all employers in our ridings. Mr. Cormier, I think Belle Baie is in yours. Scotia Harvest is in mine. They are sharing, and they're catching product. They had existing markets. They're the ones that have been doing the largest amount of work on this. They're the ones that actually have the most regulations on observer coverage and those kinds of things. There is a sharing of responsibility here in how much offshore gets versus how much inshore gets.
That's on redfish, but that goes to the point, I think, of what we're starting to see in what this report is trying to show us. There are a lot of decisions here that were not necessarily scientifically based. They were not necessarily based on cautionary principles or on new, emerging policies. They were done for political expediency by the minister. I think in an effort to appease a number of fishing organizations in Madame Lebouthillier's riding, she sort of pushed the department into coming up with new, emerging species and trying to create new fisheries to try to appease those people.
What we're seeing is that a lot of times, when we go down these roads, it creates a precedence in other fisheries across the Atlantic that are so important for us.
My question is for the staff here, and again, thank you so much for being here. It's really hard to try to put that Jell-O back into the plastic bag that was created here. Can you give us a bit of a timeline on when this exploratory versus emerging fishery thing started to happen in the gulf, when it came to lobster more specifically? I know there have been some other sharing arrangements because of shrimp and redfish.