I can. Thank you, Chair.
Ms. Gelfand and gentlemen, thank you for being here.
I want to go back to your last comment. You say that you now have a process whereby industry and environmental groups are cooperating, are working together, to achieve some consensus on the kinds of changes required.
When you last appeared here, on June 2, 2009, I asked if you could distill to one page the recommendations you were making. At the time, we were debating SARA, and at that time, you committed to returning a page or two to us with kind of a balance of recommendations.
We haven't seen that, Chair. I don't think it's been followed up on.
It certainly would be helpful, whatever you can put forward, and the more diversified the better. If you can bring forward recommendations for change that have gone through a process before arriving here and that bear the thumbprints and fingerprints of environmental groups and industrial sectors that are in agreement on the kinds of changes that might be made, it certainly would make our job easier in terms of the recommendations in the report.
If I could, I want to go to all three of you, just to help us understand something.
Mr. McGuinness, you said something about the differences between DFO's and COSEWIC's approach to determining the status of stock--I really appreciated that insight--and the difficulty of reconciling two fundamentally different scientific approaches. You said that the aquatic community, writ large, would be hard pressed to buy into COSEWIC's rate-of-decline approach as opposed to the precautionary ecosystem management approach that has evolved over time. Why?