Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to make a brief comment and then I'll ask one last question.
My comment is that I used to work as a fisheries technician for the Province of Alberta. I remember a specific incident around a walleye minimum size experiment we were doing, a catch and release experiment. We basically went out with a gillnet to see how many tagged fish we would get back in correspondence with others. Of course, we used the fish for aging, sex verification, growth rates, and all the other good things.
I remember that when we went out, we netted a whole bunch of walleye. Of course, there's not a commercial fishery for walleye in Alberta. There's a commercial fishery for whitefish and other types of basically pelagic fish. And incidentally, if you catch walleye or northern pike, as a commercial fisherman you can sell them, as you well know.
I remember that we specifically couldn't contract out anybody to come and do that work for us. We caught a bunch of walleye and basically ended up puncturing their bladders after we did our test and getting rid of them at the bottom of the lake. The optics of bringing in all those fish in front of a bunch of sport fishermen wasn't very good either.
It seems to me that some common sense has to prevail in all of this so that we're not wasting the resource and we're not doing things that are clearly in violation of the law either.
But I just throw that out as a comment.
The last thing I want to talk about concerns page 16 of the deck that was provided by Madam Kirby.
I consider Alberta and Saskatchewan to be very similar in their resources and so on, although I know that one has a little bit more water. Based on “Annex 2: Application of Operational Statements by Provinces”, it seems to me that an operational statement is fine for directional drilling in Saskatchewan, and not in Alberta. It's fine for beach maintenance and log salvage in Saskatchewan, but not in Alberta. In fact, if you look at how the application of operational statements by provinces lines up, Alberta has the least amount of operational statements that apply.
Is that because there is less water, or there are fewer conditions for operational statements in Alberta? Or is it particularly a matter that we need to be more careful in one province than in another?
I'm just wondering why there's a discrepancy there.