Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
To all of our witnesses, thanks for a very informative.... I noticed that two of you felt you were being redundant, but actually, there's a lot of commonality in the importance of the area we're going into. I appreciate your input on this very important matter.
I want to start with Dr. Whoriskey. You mentioned in your remarks our approach respecting the ocean, where species are not what they used to be, where we overfished and then stopped fishing and they did not recover. Then you made a statement about our lacking understanding, saying that we're missing something in how ecosystems work, because the fish just did not come back.
One of your remarks is about the approach at the Huntsman Marine Science Centre involving collaboration with scientists from a broader section of the academic community. Out in our end, on the west side of the country on Vancouver Island, where I am from, we have the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre, a collaboration of five different institutions. They do a lot of valuable work out there.
Concerning the challenges with the ocean ecosystems, we have learned a lot, but there is so much we don't know about what's happening with species out there. I'm sure others may wish to comment on this as well.
How do we get a handle on this? So much of our environment is aquatic, out in the ocean in particular. Terrestrially, there are a lot of things we don't understand fully about our ecosystems. We had a watershed approach that was mentioned by Mr. Dupuis, in terms of managing, but in the oceans there is so much we don't know.
Where do we go with that, and what kind of collaboration is necessary to really get a fix on what is happening in the oceans?