Fisheries committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, and members of the committee. On behalf of the Ministry of Natural Resources, I'd like to thank the committee for the opportunity to discuss aquatic invasive species with you today. I'm Anne Neary. I'm the director of the Applied Research and Development Br

Fisheries committee  For Ontario, or all of Canada and the U.S.?

Fisheries committee  Yes, we were just talking of Ontario. It is in the billions if you look at the U.S. economy and other....

Fisheries committee  Are you talking specifically about ballast water regulations—

Fisheries committee  —in the U.S.? Maybe I'll ask Ala to provide more information on that.

Fisheries committee  It was a plan we developed over the last couple of years. We're just in the stages now of finalizing that plan. We posted on what's called our environmental registry for comments, so it went through that process, and we're at the point now where it's going to be finalized. It wa

Fisheries committee  To start with, I think we're certainly very supportive of enabling tools and trying to streamline our policies and regulations, and the provincial government is going through a similar exercise. I think it's necessary. The challenge with the changed wording of the Fisheries Act

Fisheries committee  Certainly we would welcome the opportunity to provide comment on what the changes mean. When you have something before you to provide comment on, it's often difficult without having the dialogue as well. The dialogue always helps to meld, I guess, what the words mean. As anybody

Fisheries committee  No, I'm not aware that we have. I don't think so.

Fisheries committee  I think it's both. I will maybe turn to Tim who can probably provide a nice scientific answer to that question.

Fisheries committee  I wanted to thank you very much for your comments about consultation and dialogue. We do appreciate that, and we look forward to commenting on the legislation.

Fisheries committee  As I say, I'm not the right person to answer that, simply because I'm involved on the science side of things, so I'm going to see.... Francine, I know you've been working with our folks to provide comments to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Can you talk a little bit mor

Fisheries committee  I don't know when we started to provide comments back. Was it in the last month?

Fisheries committee  It's inconsistent, but I will say that certainly, there were rumours. I think everybody knows that, and the province didn't want to react in the absence of actually seeing the actual wording. It's easy to jump to conclusions before you really understand what's being proposed. We

Fisheries committee  I haven't personally, no, but I haven't been involved in that side of it. I'm not sure whether our policy director has seen a copy of the draft or been consulted.