Madam Chair, I will tell the House what would be a slap in the face to the industry. It would be mismanagement enough to allow overfishing and actually fishing out the resource.
What we are doing is protecting the future for the fishermen's children and grandchildren.
As I said, this was not a decision that was taken lightly, but I can say that these decisions are based on science. If we look back to what happened to the cod fishery in Newfoundland, we should have been making more decisions based on science. We cannot just look after today.
I know that this is causing a lot havoc for a lot of people and they are trying to cope.
I can tell the hon. member that last October the federal government transferred labour market agreement and labour market development agreement funds to the province and it has the flexibility to assist the people who are currently out of work.
There is not a big crab processing sector on Prince Edward Island, but some people no doubt will be affected. We have talked to many of the financial institutions. In a lot of cases, provinces are financing enterprises and they have been flexible in their repayment terms because they realize that people are seeing some hard times in this fishery sector.