Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for coming here today. This is very interesting to me, and the reason it's interesting is that I have a zoology degree in fisheries and aquatic sciences from the University of Alberta and I worked for a number of years as a fisheries technician for Alberta Fish and Wildlife. I was a technician working on a walleye experiment—my experience is strictly freshwater—but the underlying principles I think are still the same.
I've also had the privilege of serving my country as a conservation officer and as a national park warden, and I'm going to talk a little bit about that, because I've gone through some of the information that has been made available to me, and the one argument that I think is always missing from organizations that want to protect or promote marine ecosystems is the economic argument. They make an excellent case from the scientific perspective, they make a good case from a public policy perspective, but they don't make a very good case from the economic perspective. You've touched on that and said that if we changed our focus, managing in a different way from the traditional focus on exploitation, managing for rebuilding would provide those economic benefits. I'd like to talk about that.
I'll give you an example from when I was a national park warden. A national park is a refuge. It is a completely different underlying principle from a conservation model; it is a preservation model. In a national park, you would have herds of, say, bighorn sheep. That's what I dealt with in the back country. I was charged with the task of guarding the boundary, making sure that hunters, poachers, or whoever would not come into the park. At the same time, I was working in a constructive manner to do the counts and all those things to make sure that the wildlife are there.
I got to know the guides and the outfitters in the area who would charge their guests up to $30,000 each for the privilege of hunting a bighorn sheep. The best place to hunt a bighorn sheep in Alberta is right on the edge of a national park boundary, because that's the area of refuge. The bighorn sheep are not stupid; they figure that out. Because those populations are there and will eventually cross that boundary, it creates economic benefit for the area and the region; it's quite effective.
That's not going to work for all stocks. It's not going to work for pelagics; it's not going to work for stocks that migrate; it's not going to work for the diadema stocks. But it will work for groundfish and certain other stocks.
So I'm asking you, from your perspective, where it would fit in. You talked about catch shares as one of your new solutions, and about communal eco-management and fishery certification, but you didn't really talk about the perspective of protecting the bigger ecosystem. Where would that fall among the new solutions?