Indeed we do.
Thank you Mr. Chairman.
Thank you as well to the committee for inviting the department to contribute to this important discussion and for leading off, actually, with a focus on the underlying science.
My name is Dave Gillis and I'm the assistant deputy minister for science, ecosystem and ocean science at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. We're here today, a small team—I'll introduce these folks in a minute—to present the knowledge that we have available on the studies of the ecosystem in the Newfoundland shelf and to explain the science basis for the changes that we are observing there with regard to the ocean environment and the more important fishery resources which that ecosystem supports.
So to aid me, I have two folks with me here today. On my right is Jean Landry. Jean is the director general for ecosystem science for the Department of Fisheries at headquarters here in Ottawa. On my left is Dr. Pierre Pepin, who is an ocean scientist from the Newfoundland region and is very familiar with the phenomena that we'll be describing for you here today.
So beginning in another minute or so, I'll ask Dr. Pepin here to make a short presentation, which I understand has been circulated to you in advance. This presentation will actually address all of the questions that are set out in the request to appear. In that, it will summarize the most recent stock assessment for the major northern shrimp management areas on the shelf; synthesize the trends in ocean conditions that we see from our oceans monitoring program and other sources; explain the status of several other key resources, notably the snow crab and Atlantic cod; and as we understand them, review the relationships that we see between those key resources and the changing ocean conditions.
We'll also take a moment at the end to provide the committee with a short look ahead at the key science activities that we will conduct in the foreseeable future that we feel are relevant to these issues. Before we start, I should say that all of the information that will be presented in the deck and discussed here is from published science sources, both from within the department and outside, or it has been peer-reviewed and will be made public very shortly. So it's our latest information that is available on all of these topics.
So I'm now going to turn it over to Dr. Pepin to present the deck, after which we will collectively endeavour to answer as many of your questions as time allows as related to the underlying science for this portion of the ocean.
Pierre.