The fishery is safer, yes, there's no question about that. With the amount of investment that harvesters have put into it, and with the equipment they have, it's safer. But you know, all the training they've done has created sort of a false pretense amongst fishers to believe that help is going to be there within....
I mean, I've been also an instructor in safety, and you create the environment that it's at your fingertips, that all you need is the equipment. You've got this GMDS global system there, and everything is transferred. You flick this switch--bang--and everything is transferred, and all of a sudden it's activated here in Gander and that helicopter is in the air. But in the last number of incidents that we had--it hasn't really come out since--the timing factor, the response time, has been....
And people say to you, “Well, what in hell am I putting all this equipment on my vessel for? Shoot, it's going to take them two hours before they get off the ground.” I mean, that is the general attitude. Even though you may be right that they're off the ground within an hour, that is the general attitude.
One of the things, you know, is what the harvesting sector is saving the Department of National Defence, search and rescue, by their participation, by being on the spot. I connect it to the fixed-wing as well; I think it's important that fixed-wing be stationed here in this province as well, because in the fishing season we are on the water. We are on the scene. The quicker they can get a position plotted, the quicker the coast guard auxiliaries can get there. Sometimes the coast guard auxiliaries take care of it by the time the deployment is off, because it's relayed directly back to the vessel that's on the water.
The thing is that with change.... People don't see all the incidents. You're talking about all the incidents here in the province, but it's actually gone down. Fishing activity in the early nineties was much less than it has been since 2002 in terms of the amount of people on the water and the distance they're going, the time they're travelling. The activities have increased over the nineties, and the amount of death-related incidents is going down. So we're doing something right, but we need to be able to really do all we can. We're not there, and I think we need the government there.