Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I would like to come back to what Mr. Dhaliwal said to Mr. McGuinness, among others. We certainly met before, since I was my party's spokesperson of the fisheries committee for five years.
What you are saying seems to me a bit surprising. In the specific case of shrimp, quotas were increased because the industry was in a very bad way. Of course, prices had dropped, given the overabundance of shrimp on the world market. That is what happened in the past few years.
Yet, what are we doing with our production? We send it to China to have it processed, and the Chinese send it back to us. Meanwhile, our processing plants are closing. That is essentially the situation that prevails right now in my area, in the east. It is not only in Quebec, but also in Newfoundland.
We are talking about a free trade agreement with Korea, but if the Koreans were to require that part of the production be processed in their country, for example, we would simply continue to empty the oceans here without creating a single job. That brings us back to what Mr. Laliberté was saying, namely that this is more a trade policy than an industrial or social policy. The objective is solely to enrich certain industry owners or certain owners who only engage in trade, but nobody gives a hoot about the situation of the labour force, not only in Canada and Quebec, but also in Korea. In the final analysis, what is important is that there be a profit and that it continue to pour into the coffers of large corporations. We might as well forget about the social aspect; this is simply a trade agreement.
Shrimp is the typical example of a product for which a free trade agreement would be completely useless. Even if you tell me that import duties of 17% or 20% would be paid by Korea, that changes nothing. We got more from the European Economic Community. Regardless, right now there is an overabundance of this product on the world market, as well as an overabundance of animals raised in aquaculture. In any event, it is a market that will bring about nothing new. On the contrary, our plants will continue to close here because the quotas will be increased again in order to allow the fishermen to survive.
I would like to hear your views on this subject as well as Mr. Laliberté's perhaps.