We may take out some older fishers — there is a need for that; we are not claming there is not a need — to reduce our fleets in some area, but at the same token to diversify our fishery so that we can create employment in our communities and maintain their viability rather than having them shrink and becoming marginalized.

It is all the more shocking because this train was not an old train, but a jewel of our region and it was a new route that was only opened a few years ago.

It is difficult to predict the exact consequences but there is a high probability that the growing backlog of older ships will in a few years result in a rebound of dismantling activity.

Forgive me, Mr President, but they say that our Spanish or Danish friends have old calves more than eight, nine or ten months old, sort of grandfather calves, that they still call ‘veal’.

We will want to call someone from the Old Port of Montreal.

About 40% of the fleet are at least 20 years old.

These challenges are very clear – how to revitalise our economies just a few weeks before the introduction of the single currency, how to take advantage of the challenges and opportunities offered by accession, with 13 countries seeking entry to the Union and, at the same time, how to reinvent Europe in a situation and at a moment when we are about to begin the work of a convention aimed at preparing a new Intergovernmental Conference, the objective of which must be to prevent the ‘Old Continent’ becoming an outdated continent.

We monitor, and we are familiar with, the work done by the Commission and the Council on the Erika 1 package, but regarding this strait, which is notorious in the two countries concerned and within the European Union as a particularly tricky passage, one often used by large vessels in order to gain just a few hours at the risk of some old tub’s running aground and causing a disaster, I should like to know, and more especially the inhabitants of Corsica and Sardinia would like to know, if it will be at all possible, and if you have any such plans, to issue a ban, pure and simple, on large vessels, containers, using the Strait of Bonifacio ...[+++].

Third, based on our reading of this bill and on the old saying that the past is a guide to the future, it is far from obvious that the Department of Canadian Heritage provides the guarantees required to defend the French language and culture, especially those needed for the francophone and Acadian communities in Canada to continue to develop, flourish and even exist.

We have replaced some old wooden coastal ships with 12 of them, if not 14—12 maritime coastal—that we're using all across Canada.