Fisheries committee  Having access to the gear is a key thing. This gear is not easy to come by, and it is expensive. This is why, for example, the gear-lending program is a great model for these early days so that fish harvesters don't need to make these tremendous investments into this gear just yet.

Fisheries committee  I'm so pleased to hear from the fish harvesters who work with us, who do the experimentation, and especially the ones who benefited from the lending program this year. In their words, they talk about how access to this equipment saved their fishery, with 375,000 pounds of snow crab fished out of a closed area, because otherwise they would have had to steam many hours away to fish.

Fisheries committee  The participation rate was quite good. We had 10 fish harvesters who took advantage of our lending program. They were the ones who were the most put out because of the closures and most immediately needed access to this gear to allow them to keep fishing in those closed areas.

Fisheries committee  That's a tough question. We haven't received any clarity about whether this will continue to be supported. My organization is very committed to finding a way to make sure that we can continue providing this equipment to fish harvesters to use. Many of our fish harvester partners have become quite committed to seeing this program continue.

Fisheries committee  Many of the fish harvesters that we work with have a saying, and I like this saying. They say you don't have a whale in your area until you have a whale in your area. One of the things we've seen in recent years with these whales is that their habitat is shifting, and they are moving to different areas.

Fisheries committee  There's quite a lot of confidence with regard to those types of sightings. Everyone's very attentive to the fact that there can be misidentifications. Often there are photographs that need to be seen by experts who can identify right whales or parts of right whales. We're quite certain that those are correct.

Fisheries committee  You mean the on-demand systems.

Fisheries committee  It definitely takes experimentation, and it takes experimenting with the fishermen. We've not fished this on-demand gear in 800 fathoms of water, so what you're saying is exactly correct. There are a lot of challenges and stresses that are involved in those kinds of fisheries, especially if you have 800 fathoms of buoy line and you're probably fishing a two-to-one scope, so maybe you have 1,600 fathoms of buoy line.

Fisheries committee  Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Sean Brillant. I'm the senior conservation biologist at the Canadian Wildlife Federation for the marine programs. I have been working on right whales since 2007. I have the benefit of sitting on several national and international committees concerning the management and study of North Atlantic right whales: the Ropeless Consortium; the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium; Transport Canada's technical advisory committees for vessel safety; and DFO committees such as the large whale disentanglement advisory committee, the right whale technical working group and the advisory committee for right whales.