The inshore owner-operator fishery is complex, and there are a lot of policies and legislation in place to protect them, but it's well known through the federal government and through the industry that these companies will look for loopholes. They will look for other ways to work around these policies.
Illegal controlling agreements are one. They've already been eroding the share and ownership of community-based fisheries by trying to take more and more financial control of the licences. The erosion has already started to happen on this end.
By allocating future quotas to corporate fleets instead of community-based fisheries, we're preventing this seasonal industry from being able to sustain itself. The struggle in the fishery is always to make sure people are getting enough weeks of work and enough hours of work per week in a year, and by providing more quota allocations to community-based fisheries, we are providing more hours of work and more economic sustainability to these people. It also makes it more attractive for younger people to look at this industry and say, “I want to stay in my community, and if I'm going to work in the fishery, it needs to be able to support me and my family.”
These are things that are really important when we look at resource management decisions.