Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the points made but part of my fear is that a true tribunal decides who is and who is not a fisherman, and that definition of what a core fisherman is.
I remember growing up in Comeauville and it was the same at every wharf where the local fishermen would decide by intimidation who could integrate the fishery and who could not, and then we sort of opened that up.
I remember a gentleman moving to western Nova Scotia from New Zealand. There was no way he would be encouraged to get in the fishery and no way that he would ever be defined as a core fisherman. Nobody would give him his first job but the guy had gumption. He bought the oldest boat he could find and got a licence before they were expensive. Bit by bit he learned to fish and within 15 or 20 years he was heading up the organization. He was representing those fishermen at that wharf.
A fisherman becomes a fisherman by leaving the dock at the helm of a vessel, baiting a hook and catching a fish. That makes him a fisherman. It is not by some definition nor by a judgment of a tribunal or by decisions by another group as to who is a fisherman or that the person must be the grandson of a fisherman to be a fisherman.
Things change and evolve but those types of directions and those types of claustrophobic things make me nervous.
I know a young man who started fishing this year, his first year as a captain in Comeauville, out of Meteghan, with his own rig. His father was not a fisherman nor was his grandfather, but he got the courage to try it. He got fishing under a trust agreement the first year, the first year that he was able to and the first year he could get out of the wharf. Now he is a fisherman. He has bought a rig and he is fishing. I hope he will do very well. I want to encourage young people to have that same opportunity.