Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I'd like to thank you and the committee members here today for inviting me to appear on fairly short notice. I'm certainly honoured to do so. I've actually appeared before the Senate committee on several occasions in the past in a previous capacity, but it's my first appearance before the House of Commons committee. I'm quite happy to appear.
In the ten to fifteen minutes I have, I'd like to do three or four things.
I'd like to start by introducing you to the centre and telling you who we are, what we do, what our successes have been, and so on and so forth.
Then I'd like to provide you with a snapshot of our focus, the kind of work we undertake as a centre, and I'm going to focus primarily on lobster because of the topic of discussion here.
Third, I'm going to talk a little bit about the work we're doing in the lobster industry, both in terms of research and development activities and in terms of the recent work we've done with the lobster summit about a year and a half ago, and the lobster round table, which I understand you've heard quite a bit about.
Finally, and I guess perhaps most importantly from our standpoint, I'm going to touch briefly on where we are as an organization from a funding standpoint and how that impacts on so many of the things we do, including our activities in the lobster industry.
I've provided the clerk of the committee with a copy of the presentation deck that I was going to go through, and I'm going to go through in brief, but unfortunately there wasn't enough time for translation, given the short notice. You'll get this material over the next day or two, but I will take you through it in brief.
The Canadian Centre for Fisheries Innovation was established in 1989 by the Marine Institute in Memorial University. If you think about it, 1989 and the subsequent years were a period of tremendous difficulty in the groundfish industry. The idea behind the centre was that the resources within the academic community--the largest flume tank in the world at the Marine Institute, as well as engineers, technologists, and biologists--weren't being applied in any meaningful fashion to solve the problems and identify opportunities in the fishing industry. So that was the concept. What we are, essentially, is....
Sorry.