Fisheries committee  I think the IPAC group, the independent panel on access criteria, did come later after the 2000 integrated fisheries management plan was put together. But it did finally come out and say that we should look at dependency, adjacency, and the historical link to the fishery. In th

Fisheries committee  I think in most fisheries we've locked in stability of access and allocation. We have decision points that deal with what would trigger a change, so I think that most of the time it's fairly transparent. It's in the integrated fisheries management plan. It's been discussed with s

Fisheries committee  From our perspective what's unfortunate is that we don't see a way to avoid negative impacts. Now, that means that the minister has the unfortunate job in this case of having to determine how to manage that negative change. In the event it continues, that's the reality to be face

Fisheries committee  I understand that point of view. Obviously, these are hard decisions, and I think it's not going to get any easier. It's going to get even more difficult, possibly next year. Those are points of view that will have to be taken into consideration as we move forward.

Fisheries committee  I think the answer would be yes, that we don't want to manage to noise. We've done that in the past as well where we see something.... For example, 3Ps cod has great noise in the analysis, and if you manage to that, you're just going to create biological and economic chaos. It's

Fisheries committee  There's a lot of cod in the world. We don't have a lot of it, but there are a million tonnes in the world, and that may be a rounded number, but hundreds of thousands of tonnes exist, and the markets will not notice our fish, so the price will not go up. There is a caution, I th

Fisheries committee  We have to avoid the temptation to start cropping it off. We've done that in the past. As soon as it starts to grow, we crop, and we had to shut it down again. So I think we have to be very prudent with that. As I said, it has done better on the Flemish Cap for biological reasons

Fisheries committee  I'll turn to my colleague, David Gillis, in a second, but I think it's fair to say in the fish management business, you always need to deal with uncertainty. You will never get enough certainty to narrow the confidence limits to a point where you have a very precise number. You'r

Fisheries committee  That's correct. So it was pretty clear.

Fisheries committee  After all those meetings that I mentioned between the province, DFO, and the stakeholders, a whole suite of changes took place and were announced jointly by the province and by Minister Hearn. Included in those was the change in the status of the licences for the inshore shrimp

Fisheries committee  The Fisheries Act does provide a great deal of discretion to the minister; the minister has that kind of discretion. We had a review of access criteria by the Independent Panel on Access Criteria. They said that adjacency, historical attachment, etc., were all considerations. T

Fisheries committee  They're licensed to fish in a number of zones. That means that they are permitted to do so. The original quota of 37,600 tonnes was split among various areas. For example, 11,000 tonnes of it at the time was in SFA 6. The expectation of those in the offshore is that they'll sti

Fisheries committee  I think first we should just go back to 1997. It was very clear at that point that people getting into the fishery over each of the subsequent years from 1997 on to 2007 were informed that in the event that the stock went back down, they were out. That was the reality at that poi

Fisheries committee  Thank you. I have a very short presentation, and then I'll turn it over to questions. On the principles of fisheries management, DFO manages fisheries in accordance with our roles and responsibilities outlined in the Fisheries Act, and we use credible science, affordable and ef

Fisheries committee  We have is river-by-river measures, so we have conservation limits that we're looking at achieving on each river. We have seen significant differences in at-sea survival. If you look at the inner Bay of Fundy, those are very stressed stocks. They're endangered. We have not been a