Public Accounts committee  As I mentioned, the industry tends to be cyclical. Just for background, we used to receive appropriations from the government. In 1995 that was cut off, so from 1996 forward, in the 20-year period, we have had profits of about $13 million. So, yes, we've had two periods during th

Public Accounts committee  Again, we do have, for example, a line of credit that we can use. We haven't had to use it, except for about $60,000 or something like that. We haven't had to use it over the last few years. We do have that line of credit in reserve.

Public Accounts committee  We've had a financial plan. We've had that since the nineties at least. We do a five-year corporate plan, and that carries our finances out over a five-year period. Each year we update that five-year plan. We have run into some difficulties over the past couple of years in part

Public Accounts committee  I don't think we were hiding them.

Public Accounts committee  I'm sorry. We've known that this is an issue. The Pilotage Act has been set up so that you can have two types of pilots: members of a body corporate or employees. Most of our pilots are employees. In some smaller areas, such as Restigouche, which includes the port of Dalhousie,

Public Accounts committee  It's the small areas. We have made attempts in the past to get bodies corporate established. In fact, in Miramichi we had a body corporate. One of the pilots is now retired—

Public Accounts committee  There is a contract with Miramichi River Services. We attempted to get contracts in some of the other areas. Essentially the pilots said they would stop working if they had to form a body corporate and engage with us. We were left in a position of deciding whether we should cont

Public Accounts committee  —and we've been getting legal advice. The legal advice we have received is—

Public Accounts committee  We don't have competition. There are some areas where private pilots are providing a service, but we don't have competition in compulsory ports like Halifax, Saint John, and so on.

Public Accounts committee  In the case of this most recent three out of four years when we were in a deficit, we had enough cash reserves from the $5.3 million we had made in the three or four years before that to carry us through that period of time. As mentioned earlier, it's a cyclical business where w

Public Accounts committee  We're a crown corporation. We're one that doesn't get any funding from the federal government. We're not funded. We have to make our own revenues. What we attempt to do is to have each of our compulsory areas at least break even. Does it always work? No. Obviously, when we're lo

Public Accounts committee  May I just make a comment? Regarding those two years where we had losses, we actually had budgeted to have small profits during those years. We ran into a couple of issues that caused us to lose some revenue. One of the issues, and I won't bore you with it in detail, was that th

Public Accounts committee  Yes. What we tend to look at is, over a longer term, we have to make some money or at least break even. As Sean mentioned in his presentation, since 2007, we've built four pilot boats at a cost of about $13 million and we only financed a portion of that. The rest came from our ca

Public Accounts committee  Twenty-eight years.

Public Accounts committee  I agree with Captain Griffiths. I don't think we were in a dysfunctional situation. We were in a position where I guess timing of the audit was at the same time that we were missing some people in our management, who we later replaced. From the board perspective, Anne Galbraith c