Thank you very much, and thank you to our witnesses.
Mr. Bevan, you mentioned that the Larocque decision had a profound consequence for fisheries management as well as for funding for fisheries management and science. Fisheries and Oceans Canada, over the last number of years, has engaged in partnership agreements with various governmental and non-governmental organizations. Allocations of fish were given to organizations and agreements were struck whereby having been granted access to that fish, the fisheries organizations, with the assistance of DFO, would expend a certain amount of money conducting a scientific protocol. And they would share that scientific data with Fisheries and Oceans. The Larocque decision by the Federal Court, you said, once it was decided, basically made that capacity or that possibility for DFO null and void.
Could you provide a list of all discontinued agreements, the ones that have either been allowed to lapse or have been terminated as a result of the Larocque decision? And could you indicate for us what the consequence has been for the departmental budget?
I will give you one example. In the northern shrimp fishery, Fisheries and Oceans Canada entered into an agreement with the Northern Coalition, allocating, I think, 5,000 metric tonnes of prawns to that organization to conduct science. You have now stated that the agreement has been terminated. Who is doing the science now, and what happened to the 5,000 tonnes of fish? It was granted to the Northern Coalition on the understanding that they were conducting science for the benefit of all users of the resource. Is that science now being done by Fisheries and Oceans? What has replaced it, and who has access now to that 5,000 tonnes?