Thank you very much.
One of the dangers of being the last speaker on an eminent panel is that you become increasingly redundant. However, I will proceed to the best of my ability.
My name is Fred Whoriskey. I am a research scientist by training and currently the executive director of the Ocean Tracking Network at Dalhousie University. This is a project that is wiring the world's oceans with Canadian-made, state-of-the-art technology. It is documenting movements of marine animals, where they're going, the habitats they use, and tying those to environmental conditions. I have that perspective to bring here.
I appear before you today on behalf of Huntsman Marine Science Centre. I was requested by the board to make this presentation about the national conservation plan and what the Huntsman might contribute to developing it.
Personally, I've lived and worked in communities around the ocean all of my life, and I know how the livelihood and social fabric of these communities depends on the water. People take to the water naturally for their livelihood. They develop a special series of skills that occupy them on the water, and they take great pride in everything they do there.
Historically we have had a limited selection of choices from which we might make a living. We were in the transportation field, moving goods from one place to the other. That field is incredibly healthy, even now. It's brought its own problems as it's become bigger and bigger, but people are still moving quantities of goods we could never conceive of before.
By contrast, over the past century the other pillar of our activities in the ocean, the fisheries, has gone into a steady and massive decline. This is due in large measure to our increasing technological sophistication and power that has managed to permit us to overharvest almost every part of the ocean where we find fish stocks right now. The sustainable opportunities in the fisheries have consequently disappeared, not only in Canada but globally.
We've applied our traditional solutions to that, which is to stop what we're doing and let the fish rebound, and what's happened is that they have not rebounded. At the end of the day, it indicates that we don't understand. We don't understand what's driving these populations. It's a knowledge question, and we are not applying the appropriate management regimes because we don't know what the drivers are. It's a fundamental misunderstanding.
Due to these lost opportunities, and just due to the innovativeness of Maritimers, people have also been turning to the ocean for alternate economic development. Technology has steamed the way forward on this. If you look at a partial list of what we are doing out there now, it includes things like marine pharmaceuticals; marine tourism; tidal power; aquaculture, notably the Atlantic salmon farming industry. We have deep-water mining that's beginning to develop, and oil and gas extraction is very important here on the east coast. The National Research Council and others are developing algae as biofuel. We have marine engineering, and then ultimately a technology sector that's providing the technology to permit all of those other things.
All of these new activities have the potential to bring employment, wealth, and other benefits to coastal nations, but they're also bringing additional pressures to the ocean. They also have the potential to conflict with each other in competition for access to the ocean environment. Hence, the need for the conservation plan.
What we need are new management models that will eliminate or at least mitigate the conflicts and the increasing damage that could occur from unsustainable activities. Our informed decision-making in the future is going to depend on trusted research to acquire the new and necessary knowledge, and then ultimately push that knowledge out to all levels of society so people will understand what we're doing and how we're making our decisions. That requires a sustained knowledge infrastructure and a sustained education structure to push the materials out.
The Huntsman Marine Science Centre operates in that particular sphere. We've been in operation for over 40 years and at the forefront of both fundamental and applied ocean research. That is what we can bring to contribute to a national conservation plan. Our researchers, in collaboration with scientists from member academic organizations, private sector, and government institutions, have provided high-quality, independent, and trusted results—knowledge that goes into this decision-making process.
This has assisted in the development of our understanding of the marine environment, how it's reacting to the current stressors, and trouble-shooting of new problems as things have erupted. This has occurred in sectors from as diverse as tidal power to the aquaculture domain in our particular areas.
We also have an extensive education program that outreaches to thousands of students. Every year we've built a new aquarium in St. Andrews, which is about the Bay of Fundy, as an outreach opportunity to bring people in.
We're training future highly qualified ocean science personnel and distributing the knowledge to Canadian citizens through them. We're looking to a future when these ocean experts we need to do the work, and our citizens, are as informed as they need to be to contribute to debate and take on the value of the natural environment as we know it.
The take-home message is that what we have to contribute to a conservation plan is knowledge. You start with the data and you turn it into knowledge.
Huntsman helps to assist with this. It's an independent agency that consequently operates in a comfortable zone, one where people can trust it. Huntsman is not the only one; there are many here in Canada that can be drawn upon to do this. It is a very valuable resource for the country.
As a consequence, we are very, very grateful for this opportunity to speak to this committee. I thank you very much. I tried not to be redundant in all the conclusions that everybody else has already made.
Thank you.