Robert Thibault

[Fisheries Act, 2007, May 29th, 2007]

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.

[Fisheries Act, 2007, May 29th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to discuss Bill C-45. This is a very ambitious bill designed to replace the current Fisheries Act, which has undergone some changes but is more than 136 years old. There is general agreement that the current legislation is flawed and must be amended. However, there are problems associated with amending this sort of legislation.

People in the fishing industry will often say that they do not like the legislation as it stands, but that they can survive nonetheless. They have an industry and are getting by. If this legislation is replaced, it must be replaced with a better bill that will improve the fishery for families, fishers and coastal communities.

This bill contains several provisions to that end, but it also has some weaknesses. I am finding resistance and fear in the fishing communities in my riding and elsewhere. People are asking me to vote against this bill. I think this is unfortunate, because with a few amendments, the bill could be very good for the fishing industry and could bring stability.

But the government is refusing to make those amendments. We are being asked to adopt the bill at second reading in order to introduce the necessary amendments, but we know that they will not be in order. They would be now, but they will not be after second reading, in committee. I think this is unfortunate.

Now, the minister controls the wording of the bill. I believe he should hold consultations on the bill's wording in coastal communities, in fishing communities, with the groups concerned, and make amendments. They are not major amendments. The bill the minister is introducing does not have to be rejected. With minor changes, it would be an excellent bill.

The minister could do that. According to the motion introduced by the Liberal fisheries critic, the minister could make the amendments that have been introduced. I therefore encourage him to do so.

However, what we have here and what we are going to discuss is the bill in its current form. Again, I do not think this is a bad deal. I think it has some weaknesses. I participated, as many others did, in the Atlantic fisheries policy review, a wide-ranging session of consultations with the industry, communities and the provinces, and we came to the acceptance of a document. We accepted the proposals of the review and I see pretty well all of them within this bill.

As for where I have problems with the bill, I am going to talk about two areas. Other colleagues will talk about other areas. I am going to talk about two areas that are problematic. They are not easy to resolve. Now that he has the text of the act, I would encourage the minister to consult, based on the text he received from the communities, on the modifications that would improve that act and that he consider bringing them forward to Parliament, as the committee will not be able to do it at second reading.

One problem is the question of licence ownership. It has been stated by the courts in decisions that a licence is not a property. It is a permit. It is not property. That is understood. It has been understood in jurisprudence. However, in the evolution of our fisheries it has become an asset. It has value. It is often the pension plan of the family participating in that fishery. When the family leaves the fishery, it transfers the right to exercise that licence for a consideration of capital, of money, and that forms the pension plan for that family.

Now the proposed act states directly that the licence is not transferrable. The minister has said in the media, and he probably will say it again in the House, that his intent is that it continue as it was in the past and that people be permitted to transfer or sell their interest, to sell their right to apply for that annual permit. I believe he is sincere in that desire.

What worries me is what a judge will say in 5, 15 or 20 years when he is presented with a case wherein people are objecting to a transfer of a licence. He will be presented with a case and with an act which specifically states that the licence is not transferrable. If an organization, a petitioner to the court, wants a licence to cease existing on the retirement of a fisherman because it thinks cute little crabs should be swimming around the bottom of the ocean forever and should not be harvested, what then would a judge say in that instance? I believe there is some work to be done there.

The other area that I want to discuss is the question of the tribunals. Currently in the act if there is an offence or allegations of an offence under the act, the choice of the department is to charge the fisherman or fisher person or company and take them to court. It is a long, arduous and expensive process that clogs Canadian courts. This proposed act wants to bring back the way it was a while back and which had been successfully challenged in court, that is, the administrative sanctions. It would bring them back in the form of a tribunal, so that rather than going to court, sanctions could be imposed by the department with agreement of the offender or after a trial before the tribunal.

That is all good. I think that is excellent. What is lacking is a method of appeal. I hear concerns in fishing communities that the people on these tribunals are going to be named by the government of the day and are going to be political hacks. I do not have a problem with the government of the day naming the people on the tribunal. As a government is replaced, people will be named by the new government.

What I am concerned about is that the people on the tribunal have the ability and ethical values to do their job properly, that is, that they are able to do it and that they do it properly. The only way we can ensure that is if their decisions can be appealed to a higher instance. If their decisions cannot be appealed, then they stand, whether the decisions are good or bad. Rather than properly exercising their judicial or quasi-judicial responsibilities, their master remains the person who appointed them, the minister. As long as they make the minister and the deputy minister happy, they will continue to be reappointed. I believe there should be an appeal process. It would ensure that their job is done with integrity and transparency.

I want to return to the licensing and give an example of a good principle poorly applied and its negative impact. I want to give an example of the ministerial order given by the minister a few weeks ago with respect to trust agreements.

Trust agreements exist in my part of the world in two areas. They exist in the groundfish industry and the lobster industry.

The minister has stated that it is his intention to legitimize the existing process and permit vertical integration within the groundfish industry. I applaud him for that. That is the direction I was suggesting. It is the direction in which we have been going. I think that is excellent.

In the lobster industry there are 1,000 licences in Digby County, Yarmouth County, Shelburne County and in part of my colleague's riding across the way, South Shore, in St. Margaret's.

Twenty or 30 years ago the cost of getting involved in that industry would have been $20,000 to $100,000. A young person who wanted to enter that fishery would use the old backing system. He would see a lobster broker or buyer and the lobster buyer would sign at the bank or lend the young person $15,000 or $20,000. The young person would have to find another $10,000 and then he would be in. By a gentleman's agreement the harvester would sell his product to that buyer. That buyer would have security of supply. The young person starting in the industry would have a reasonable source of capital. Over time, times were very good in that industry.

The Marshall decision created the government buying lobster licences and other licences which quickly inflated the prices. All of a sudden, with the combination of the Marshall decision implementation and the economic benefits of that industry, licences hit $200,000, $300,000, $400,000, $500,000, $600,000 up to $800,000. The vessel and the gear would cost another $300,000 to $600,000.

The gentleman's agreement did not work any more. The person who was going to shell out or guarantee up to $1 million had to have some security. He needed two things. As a broker he needed security of supply; he needed lobster. He was not going to spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars marketing lobster if he could not be guaranteed supply. The other thing is he needed to be sure that if he lent $1 million to somebody that he would get it back.

The lawyers worked behind the scenes and they found ways around the policy and they came to the trust agreement. DFO policy continues to state that the licence must be held by an individual. They did the beneficial use or trust agreements. They were able to integrate in that way. In the beginning it worked fine, but with time there was movement by a few companies toward accumulation of a disproportionate share of the licences. It put fear in the community that no longer would it be an independently held industry contributing its maximum to the economy, creating riches for a lot of people.

There is another type of trust agreement. Of 1,000 licences my estimation would be that there are a couple of hundred in corporate trusts and probably 300 in individual and family trusts.

A lobster fisherman wants to turn over his assets to his son or daughter but it is $1 million and that is his pension plan. He is worried because he has to protect himself in case it does not work out, so he creates a trust and he turns the shares over bit by bit to the second generation and gets his pension. As people retire, a father or mother might want to buy licences in the market for two or three of their children. They will create trusts for those purposes. Those are not seen in the community as being dangerous. They are not seen as undermining the independence of the industry.

The minister, based on the good principle that the independence of the fishery has to be protected, said that only the banks would be able to mortgage and that within seven years all the other corporate trusts would have to be dissolved. The principle is good but what happened with the implementation of that is that the other 300 what I call reasonable trusts got caught in that trap. The average fisherman who was preparing to retire saw his licence value decrease from $600,000 to $300,000 overnight. About $600 million disappeared in capital value of fishing families, people preparing for retirement, in western Nova Scotia.

I have written to the minister asking him to reconsider. I understand there is a question of extending the sellout period or the dissolving period of those trusts to 17 years.

I would ask the minister to go further. I would ask him to look at the underlying causes that created those trusts. How do we change our policies in a way that would promote reasonable economic development of the fishery and maintain as much as possible the independent nature of the fishery? There are four points that I continually raise.

The first is the elimination of the capital gains tax. I congratulate the government for having done that. The government went further with this year's budget than it did with last year's budget and it came to what was in our Liberal policy platform. That was the responsible action to take and I thank the government for doing that.

The second point is access to capital. For an independent fishery to exist, the individual has to be able to compete with anybody else who would be trying to integrate into that fishery.

I should point out that what scares me under the tribunal system is the tribunal could decide who could and could not be a fisherman. That is risky. A fisherman should be a person who can acquire a licence or be entrusted with a licence and leave the wharf. It should be decided like that. It should evolve naturally and normally as it always has. A fisherman needs access to capital. He needs to be able to compete for it.

Then there is the brokerage sector. The brokerage sector, or the lobster buyers as we know them, need security of supply. They need to know they will be able to buy lobster in the future. They should have a reasonable way of competing with everybody else who is trying to do the same. That maximizes the value of lobster. It maximizes the revenue to the fisherman. It maximizes the return to the country and to the community.

I suggest that the licences be under a financial instrument. Because a licence is not property, it is difficult to call it a mortgage so I call it a financial instrument. We should let the banks enter into a financial instrument, or whatever the proper term would be, with the fisherman, so if he does not make repayment, the bank can get the licence, force its sale, and recover that way. The courts have found that to be okay and it is under appeal now.

I would suggest that we go further and let lobster buyers and the marketing industry get into those types of instruments. Then they would not have to do a trust. It would also cost them a lot less money. They would have more financial security as long as the person whose name the licence is in could buy out of the obligation in a reasonable manner as a person would on a mortgage on any other business or real property. That would help a lot.

Families or lobster fishermen should be permitted to create companies and put their licences under companies. Partnerships should be permitted. However, holding more than one lobster licence within a corporation or any individual or corporate entity having shares or interests in more than one of these corporations should not be permitted. Any one of those corporations or any fisherman should not be permitted to have licences in more than one lobster fishery area. We see that now in areas where they do very well. Fishermen use the capital to compete with larger vessels in other fisheries in their off season. That has a huge risk.

Existing trusts could be grandfathered. They should not be stale dated. If ever the fisherman sold his assets of the company holding the trusts, he could not sell those trusts with them. The fisherman could not sell one company to another. Any time those licences were moved, they would have to go under the new rules. I think that the market would level off.

People holding 20 or 30 licences in trust would have $20 million or $30 million tied up and they could not use that asset at the bank. They could not because of their trust agreements, their counter-policy with the department; with the signature on an order, the minister could dissolve the licence so it would have no value at the bank. The person could not use it to negotiate working capital in his corporation, but if the person sold the licences to the captains, if he got a financial instrument with the captains who owned the licences now, with an agreement that they sell their lobster to him at market value, they could buy out the person anytime, but the person would have a reasonable security of supply. The person could go to the bank freed up of the $20 million or $30 million obligation and as he negotiated his working capital, he could tell the bank what he expected in the amount of product he would be selling on the market in the next five years based on those things. Suddenly that business plan makes sense.

That broker has the ability to market Canadian product in the Japanese, oriental and European markets. The independence of the fishery is maintained and there is competition to buy that product from the fisherman maximizing in value.

Those four points, and there can be variations, would take away the underlying circumstances that have forced these trusts. These trusts were not some diabolical plan of people to take over the lobster fishery. If we talked to the people who are the beneficial owners of these trust agreements, they would tell us that they are not efficient at harvesting. The captains would tell us that it is not the most efficient way. The most efficient way is for the captain to own and operate his vessel. He will take care of things. He will fish when the conditions are right. He will take decisions that are appropriate for the safety of his crew and he will bring in the product.

People get involved in these trusts to have that security of supply. Lobster brokers need one thing. They need lobster. That is what they do very well.

As a young man growing up in Comeauville and fishing in the spring, I remember when there were two buyers who would come to Comeauville wharf. Essentially they were selling to two brokers in the U.S. The buyers would buy the lobster at the cheapest price possible. The price would be fixed in the spring and fixed in the fall and they would sell the lobster at a quarter a pound profit on the American market. The broker would make whatever money there was in marketing it on the American side and our fishermen lived in poverty.

Twenty or 30 years ago there started to be competition on the brokerage side. All of a sudden people were paying 15¢ to 20¢ more per pound. There were large fluctuations during the season. Fishermen themselves were brokering, developing lobster holding ponds and the lobster fishermen have done very well. They have very good family revenues. Their children are being well educated. They are contributing greatly to the economy. It is important that we protect that.

I hope the minister will give my reflections some consideration in protecting the retirement assets of these families as they approach the time to leave the fishery, as well as protecting the future of the fishery and the economy of western Nova Scotia.

[Equalization, May 15th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, tonight the House will vote on Bill C-52, the budget bill that breaks the promise to Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador on the Atlantic accords.

Will the Conservative MPs from those two provinces do the right thing, do what they were sent to Ottawa to do, and support their constituents by voting against this broken promise?

Will the Chief Government Whip permit Atlantic Conservative members to vote in support of their constituents and against this flip-flopping funding fiasco?

[Business of Supply, May 10th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I agree with the governor of the bank who said that there were problems within governance, within the income trust sector, but I also agree with him when he said it is the right vehicle for certain types of corporate investments in Canada.

Rather than fix the problem we took a nuclear bomb and wiped out the whole sector. That is like burning a forest because there are a few diseased trees. In my neck of the woods, we do silviculture for problem trees. We do not burn the forest.

[Business of Supply, May 10th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, the member raises a lot of accusations as to our former government, but he cannot even find in his bag of tricks over 13 years anything equivalent to $17 billion of untendered contracts given out within the week that we have seen by this government.

Our party supports tax fairness. We do not want to see people abuse offshore havens. If there are loopholes that need to be closed, we should close them.

What we do not agree with is tax stupidity. We do not agree with the minister standing in the House and trying to get on the news one day by putting forward an unplanned, unadvised, ill-advised little 20 second blurb that scared the whole corporate world.

People in my riding work hard at places like I.M.P. and Michelin North America. If they do not work in large industries like that, or Michelin Tires, they have pension plans invested in Canada's corporate sector and they need that corporate sector to have a level playing field. They need job growth in Canada, so that the Government of Canada can get revenues from corporations and from individuals to provide the necessary programs.

We cannot tilt the playing field away from our companies and expect that they are going to compete in the global environment in this very difficult business world. They were doing it well during our term as Liberal government.

[Business of Supply, May 10th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to the motion, a little earlier than anticipated but never too early.

This is another example of the Conservatives not having a plan to govern. We see this budget not as a plan for Canadians, nothing to aspire to, as the title would say, but as an interim document, a regroupment of sound bytes bringing us to an election.

The Minister of Finance had no intention of putting in place this elimination of the deductibility of interest for foreign investments. He did not know how to do it. He had no interest. It was a quick sound byte. It was tax fairness. He knew there would be some opposition to it and he would talk about tax fairness. In 20 seconds he can explain his side very well. However, now he has had months and all we hear are reversals where he is saying, no, not the elimination of interest necessarily but the double deduction of interest. Next week it will be something else.

I understand that on Monday he will be making a statement on this. I hope somebody is writing this one for him. I hope he has talked to people within the department. I hope he has talked to experts. I hope he is talking to the business community. I hope he is looking at what is happening in the international community, what we are competing against, what the people who are providing jobs must face day in and day out in that global business environment, and that he comes out with something that has a bit of logic.

We have seen a lot of this. We have seen during the campaign and the years before the campaign in my riding where they said that they would fix the problem of the Port of Digby. During the campaign, finally, we got the arbitrator's report on the Port of Digby. An arbitrator had been called in after serious allegations had been made by a member of the Conservative Party, questions that deserved to be looked at, I agree 100%, when the member from Colchester raised them, but the arbitrator came out and said that it was not the operators of the port who made the mistake, but that it was the federal government in the transfer.

It is true that the Liberals were in power at the time of that transfer. It was a mistake made by Transport Canada. It was previous to my being elected but it was a mistake by our government.

Now the Conservatives have the power. They have made the promise that they would fix it. Is has been 16 months and we have seen no action. The same lines are being furnished by that department.

Then we look at income trusts. They made the promise during the campaign that it would not tax income trusts. What happens? The first thing they do is tax income trusts: $25 billion to $35 billion of savings, primarily of seniors, lost, which is an unimaginably huge amount.

However, also important is the question of the hollowing out of Canada's corporate assets. These entities do not cease to exist. The ownership changes hands. If there is no vehicle to have that ownership within Canada, the ownership ends up in other countries, which is what we are seeing. We are seeing these valuable resources go to other countries.

There were problems with the income trusts in the way in which they were going but rather than surgically looking at the problems and fixing them, kapow, they dropped a nuclear bomb and wiped out the whole thing, except for real estate, which some of his friends must have understood because he agreed that it was a good vehicle for real estate investments and left the REITs, but they took out the other ones.

When the governor of the bank was before committee he said that there was a problem with income trusts and a problem with governance but that for certain investments, for certain sectors it was the proper investment. Energy was named as one of them.

I would like to advise the Chair that I will be sharing my time with the member for Scarborough Centre.

That was a fiasco with income trusts. Then we come to this famous question where we look at interest deductibily.

I will give an example of a company that is in manufacturing in Canada, that is in the transformation of products, raw materials, to manufactured goods. Let us look, for example, at the aluminum sector. To produce aluminum there needs to be energy and raw materials. One of them is bauxite. Sometimes, as a corporation competing on the market with international corporations, subsidiaries in other countries have to be bought. Mining operations have to be opened to get the bauxite. The way to do that is to borrow money, either domestically or internationally, and that has a cost, operate those facilities, and get the product, guarantee the resources, and guarantee to be able to continue to operate.

If the Minister of Finance's budget had put this in place, and the member just mentioned it, Canadian companies would no longer be competitive. No longer could companies compete with Spanish companies, American companies and European companies. They would be out of that market.

What is the only choice then? Sell the head office to a country where they can use that interest deductibility. There is no choice whatsoever.

I will give another example of the hollowing out. In military purchasing the Conservatives decided that to speed things up and give their chosen contractors all the work, that they would go with original equipment manufacturers, not only for the equipment, not only for the planes for example or the helicopters, but also for the in service support.

That in service support is very important because that is where Canadian companies have potential. That is where we can build. That is where we can develop and that is where we can compete.

I pay particular attention to I.M.P. out of Halifax, a home grown company. An immigrant came to our country and saw the potential, contracts with the military to work on Auroras, helicopters, Sea Kings, and 50% of his work is with the Canadian military. That gives him the capacity to compete internationally.

Out of Halifax and Quebec there are about 5,000 employees competing and selling in over seven or eight countries. He is providing about 5,000 jobs. There are a lot of people that I know who are retired military technicians. They go on to very gainful employment working for that company, creating value within Canada, competing with multinationals.

Now what is the situation? We have the contract, we hear, that Boeing is going to spend dollar for dollar on this contract in Canada. What the minister does not tell us is that Boeing gets to choose who it uses.

Imagine if I am a contractor and all of a sudden I have to go and beg rather than compete for my work with somebody who already has all the government work. He is guaranteed it. I have to go and beg for a little slice of that.

I would imagine that if that contractor is bidding against me in international markets that he is going to tell me that if I am going to get that work then do not bid against him on the international market. If I bid then I will be squeezed out of the Canadian market.

What is the result of that? Compound that with the ITAR rules that tells this employer who he can hire, what information he can have, and what data he can have. Then what happens to this company? There is no choice but to sell outside of Canada, to sell to another company. This is another example of hollowing out our Canadian assets.

I am not one of those economic nationalists who will say that we have to have all sorts of rules to make sure that nobody can compete to own Canadian companies. I believe that, given the right set of circumstances and a level playing field, our Canadian companies can compete in the world. We can buyout in other nations. We can compete with everybody.

But if we look at income trusts and if we look at OEM and ISS, and if we look now at interest deductibility, we are tilting the playing field away from Canadian companies. We are removing their competitiveness and all of a sudden they have no choice but to sell.

How can we ask these Canadian companies and shareholders within Canadian companies, to risk all the capital, the pensions, the future pensions of these shareholders who are the workers in our communities, and to risk everything to compete in a market where they are disadvantaged? I certainly hope that on Monday when the Minister of Finance does another flip-flop that he falls on the proper side this time.

[Nova Scotia Liberal Party, May 9th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, on April 28, the Nova Scotia Liberal Party elected a new leader: Mr. Stephen McNeil, MLA for the riding of Annapolis.

Over 1,400 delegates gathered in Dartmouth and showed Nova Scotians that the Liberal Party is alive and well, and ready to tackle the challenges of forming a strong, united alternative to the Conservatives.

Our party was fortunate to have three other strong contenders in the race: Diana Whalen, Mike Smith and Kenzie MacKinnon. These individuals should be commended for their strong performance and their commitment to the party and their province.

Stephen McNeil has stated that he is ready to support the work of our Nova Scotia MPs and stand up to this federal government to ensure that the people of Nova Scotia are provided with the same opportunities to meet their potential as other provinces and territories.

I wish to congratulate my friend Stephen McNeil and look forward to working with him in the future.

[Senate Appointment Consultations Act, May 7th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I do not know if the member understands the bill. I have no big problem with an elected Senate. I think Senate reform is a good idea. I think proportionality and representation are all good ideas, but I do not know that they can be done piecemeal.

The member said that when we have one Senate vacancy, there would be an election with a transferable ballot, a preferential ballot, not the first past the post. If we look at a province like Ontario and consider that the government is advancing two bills, one for fixed terms limiting the terms at eight years and another one for elected senators, we would have to calculate that every four years we would have at least 12 or 13 senators to be elected.

Presumably we would not have one a month or every two months. We would have these all at the same time. If we had a dozen senators and if it is split every four years for an election, then we would have a minimum of 12 people. If we want to set the selection of the three preferred ones, we would have to be voting for 36 people, I would presume, or a long list of people. It seems to me like a complicated and convoluted process.

In a province like Ontario, how would anybody from any of the regions outside Toronto ever get elected?

[Pearson Peacekeeping Centre, May 7th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, there is only one reason why one would not find that type of an activity or a major restructuring in the business plan: it is because it is not business as usual. It is purely political in order to save the electoral future of the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans and maybe two members from Newfoundland. It makes no business sense whatsoever, so it would have no place of course in any business plan.

[Pearson Peacekeeping Centre, May 7th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, the governance of the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre and its relationship to government is a fundamental question that has yet to be outlined and answered properly, and established in the right way.

It was established as a non-profit organization, selling its services to the Government of Canada. That causes a lot of trouble because three departmental clients fund its operations. A lot of the contracts it needs are sole-sourced type contracts to DND or to External Affairs through CIDA. Because it is not a related government department this creates problems. The government has had no problems with the defence industries.

The board of directors is made up of bureaucrats. The decision that should be taken by government in consultation with Pearson is whether or not it should be a stand-alone body or whether it should be part of either CIDA, National Defence or DFAIT. There would be arguments raised that it should be integrated within the government.

As for the financing, the original financing was for five years. Since that original financing on the operational side, the previous government has always maintained or increased the funding and created partnerships with the Annapolis Basin Conference Centre and other government departments that would buy services from the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre to ensure that it would be viable in the future.

This is the first time where we see such a drastic cut and even a terminator clause within the contract. They are saying that the funding is for three years only for part of its operations and then it will be done.