Mr. Speaker, for nearly a year now I have been consulting with the fishing industry, indicating to the permanent fleet that it was in the best interests of all to give temporary fishermen a permanent basis to address the perennial requests for additional quotas that we receive every spring. Every fishery in the gulf that was in difficulty would want a larger share of the gulf crab industry.
We wanted to stabilize that. We announced a permanent share at the lower end of the scale at 23%. We provided 12.5% of the allocation to the fishery and invited the traditional industry to negotiate the co-management agreement whereby we could increase their allocations by 2,000 to 4,000 tonnes.