Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you very much to our guests today.
I want to start with Mr. Ross. You used the line “plastic is everywhere”. We do our community cleanups as MPs on the east coast. My riding is Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia.
We can collect tons and tons of plastic, and we can go back several weeks later and do the same thing over again. I'm guilty of thinking of plastic as that big piece of ghost fishing gear or a big rubber boot that gets eaten by a whale, but it's really telling when you speak about plankton eating microplastics at one end of the food chain.
Ghost fishing gear is a major issue on all of our coasts. You're probably aware of the pilot project that the Government of Canada has with Nova Scotia through the Nova Scotia fisheries fund to study the effectiveness and practicality of ropeless fishing gear technology for the commercial lobster industry. That seems to me like major innovation, a major opportunity for jobs and innovation to reduce plastics from the beginning.
You work with industry. I'm interested in your thoughts on what the federal government could do to reduce plastics in commercial fishing.