If I understand the Fisheries Act correctly, any licence issued to a fisher remains the property of DFO and should be returned to DFO when the fisher ceases operations. Over time, a slight variation in the rules governing licences has emerged, allowing a fisher to transfer his licence to another fisher, subject to DFO approval.
In this case, regardless of how the licence is defined, whether it is exploratory, permanent or otherwise, the important thing is to at least ask the following question: If this licence is linked to a resource that is supposed to belong to all Canadians, as the act states, is it being managed in the best possible way?
I understand that there is a kind of acquired right for those who already have licences. However, in the future, we should be able to ensure that assistance measures can be transferred from one struggling fleet to another. You never know when a fleet that is doing well will start to struggle. We are very concerned about snow crab stocks in area 12. Sometimes we are told that things are not going well, and then we are told that things are going well. We don’t know what might happen.
When a crisis occurs, it will have repercussions on several communities around the gulf. If we had already begun discussions on the implementation of a mechanism, it might help us better overcome the crises we will face in the future, because there will be others.