Thank you, Commissioner. It's good to see you—unfortunately, perhaps for the last time. I'll direct my questions to you, and you can redirect them appropriately.
My riding is Kootenay—Columbia, located in southeastern British Columbia. My question is for Fisheries and Oceans. I was regional manager with the B.C. Ministry of the Environment, responsible for fish and wildlife, from 2002 to 2009. In the first two years, one of my tasks, unfortunately, was to cut 27% of my staff. I had to make decisions on whether to keep fish biologists or wildlife biologists. At that point Fisheries and Oceans Canada had staff in the Kootenays. They had five staff. I sat down with the manager at the time. He showed me their organization chart. They were going to have six biologists and six fisheries enforcement officers in the Kootenays, and so I cut a fish biologist and kept a wildlife biologist as one step.
Fast-forward to today, there are no fisheries officers left in the Kootenays. I'm wondering whether that may have contributed to the fact that these invasive species have not been properly identified, and whether there's an opportunity to fix that going forward and to get some staff back in the Kootenays.