The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife has a number of scientists on it. The aboriginal traditional knowledge subcommittee is a committee of 12, and they review all assessments. The work that the COSEWIC does is a lot of library work, of reviewing reports and talking to a few people. The work of the ATK subcommittee is a lot of going out onto the land, talking to elders, having meetings. It's a lot of that initial research, if you will.
The COSEWIC does not have the money for that initial research, and you alluded to section 15(2). It's a totally different world when it comes to accessing or learning about traditional knowledge.
One area where we can improve that is to better create contracts with the government, or what have you, to learn traditional knowledge. We've been trying that on the east coast with our Atlantic salmon. There's an instance where several of our aboriginal communities went to work with COSEWIC and worked with the traditional knowledge subcommittee to learn more about salmon or to share more about the salmon for that assessment, which is coming up in the fall. However, we run into the problem of working as an intermediary. The federal government and the legal and intellectual property rights qualifications that the government requires of us is a huge roadblock to sharing our traditional knowledge about the salmon when it's very clear that we want to, we want to be a part of that assessment and to help in that assessment with COSEWIC. But it's an intermediary of the federal government that is the stumbling block because of this relationship we have had over the years with the federal government.