Thank you, Mr. Chair. I certainly appreciate the testimony I'm hearing here.
Let me preface by letting you know that in a previous employment I worked as a fisheries technician for Alberta fish and wildlife division. We worked on walleye in Alberta, which are about as tasty as lobster, but that's about as close as they get. I worked on something called the minimum size limit experiment, which absolutely changed the entire fishing regulations in the province of Alberta as far as walleye is concerned.
The whole notion there was that a sport fisherman was allowed to catch three walleye at 15 inches. It was found out afterwards that a female walleye doesn't actually start spawning until about 17 inches in length. What we were doing was harvesting everything before it had an opportunity to reproduce. Lakes would be reduced to nothing but a few old walleye that managed to never get caught, and there was no healthy juvenile recruitment. I see the same thing happening here through your recommendations.
One of the things that we did was introduce something called “slot size”. That slot size protected fish that managed to get to that age when they were reproducing. They were protected in that slot, which meant that it was a non-harvestable fish. The equivalent could be said for a lobster. It's the same notion.
In your report you talk about raising the carapace length, which obviously protects a female. You go into quite a bit of detail in regard to the Bay of Fundy, and how different carapace lengths throughout the region result in different ages or different reproductive capacities or sizes at which females become reproductive.
The other difficulty we had with the walleyes was that we couldn't tell the sex. I understand that you can look at a lobster and tell if it's a female or a male, so I'm wondering why you seem to make no recommendations on whether there should be a moratorium on the harvesting of females or on whether there should be different sizes for females versus males, and why there aren't any references to a slot.
Also, while it was hinted at here, there was no actual recommendation to designate some areas as off limits. If you take a look at the lobster fishing areas, they basically cover every fishable area. There isn't a single place where a lobster can hide without the risk of having a trap set within ten feet of it.
I'm wondering why there are some of those absences, given the knowledge of other fisheries that we have around the province. I was somewhat surprised not to see some recommendations along that line.