Fisheries committee  No, it's not to deal with that. It's to keep a healthy organization going.

Fisheries committee  I would point out that the organization of fishers and all of those kinds of on-land issues do rest with the provinces. They are the ones who help with the structures, such as the FFAW in Newfoundland, the MFU in New Brunswick, etc.

Fisheries committee  We will be involved. What we would like is to have a way to talk to fishermen in LFAs where they're organized by some structure that would be approved by the province, so that we could have a conversation without having to deal with multiple different voices within one LFA.

Fisheries committee  I think COSEWIC is the body that determines it. They're not looking at, for example, a species being limited to the Latin name, the taxonomy, that way. They're saying that if you have discrete populations.... For example, there's the sockeye issue with Cultus Lake and Sakinaw Lake.

Fisheries committee  That's my short answer.

Fisheries committee  The sockeye passed us by.

Fisheries committee  At this point in time we don't want to fish wild Atlantic salmon stocks, because they are not capable of supporting a commercial fishery. But that is a fish that supports a tremendous recreational fishery and an industry, so we want to derive wealth from those populations. We'd like to stop the commercial fishing that other jurisdictions are continuing to do.

Fisheries committee  That's a communications issue for us. It's not an operational issue. The operational staff deal with the proposals that come to them. The proponents are generally focused on their job and our people are focused on their job, respectively. I don't see that as impacting on operations.

Fisheries committee  In the past we were doing 12,000. We reduced that to 8,000 by changing policies. I don't think we have enough water under the bridge right now to give you a number for the new act.

Fisheries committee  We have no plans to get engaged in that at all at this point.

Fisheries committee  As I pointed out, just to add to that, our responsibility is the management of the fisheries. We really don't want to lose our focus on what our responsibilities are. We do want to work in partnership through CCFAM and ACFAM, under the governmental arrangements. We want to work in cooperation with the provinces, but we want to stick to our knitting, which is the management of the fisheries.

Fisheries committee  The act in the past was designed to protect habitat for habitat's sake, not linked to the productivity of fisheries, etc. It put us into some fairly strange circumstances where we would be preventing somebody from draining flooded land, where if you cleared a ditch and some fish showed up, your property was all of a sudden part of fish habitat and you couldn't deal with it.

Fisheries committee  Yes, and it has stronger provisions and gives us better authorities. Kevin, did you want to add detail? I know you have a lot more.

Fisheries committee  I think the subsidies that are really of concern to trading partners are the direct subsidies. You can't have subsidies to price. Price support would be a problem. We've had that with the U.S. as well. People have looked at all of the programming around fisheries. You have small craft harbours and fishermen's EI and so on.

Fisheries committee  We always have churn. At this point in time, we have over 1,000 people who could retire without penalty and about 300 who could retire with a full pension. We have churn.