Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Good day, gentlemen. There are two or three points I would like to discuss with you.
The Fisheries Resource Conservation Council, the FRCC, did a review of the snow crab industry in 2005. You were probably made aware of all of that. The FRCC recommended in particular “that an independent, third party, apolitical structure be established to hold public hearings and make public recommendations on access and allocation issues”. The FRCC also recommended that “a framework for co-management including provisions for participatory decision-making by stakeholders, an open-transparent process, and dispute settlement mechanisms be developed and published”.
This year's catastrophe in zone 12 has had some very serious impacts. That is the criticism I want to make, that we make and that we will probably make together, I expect: since it is the Department of Fisheries and Oceans' responsibility to establish quotas, it should also have an attendant responsibility so as to be able to attenuate impacts.
This formula was proposed in 2005 and I imagine that there are others. You may have one as well. It could eventually enable us to avoid catastrophic situations like the one we saw this year. Sudden 63% cuts indicate that something is wrong. It is as though what we were told in previous years was negated. We know that insofar as the snow crab is concerned, there is a multi-year cycle. So things can be foreseen. So, either people didn't want to see what was coming, or chose to set the facts aside.
The creation of such a committee, which could conceivably be the FRCC, or some other organization, would allow us to prevent catastrophic situations like the one we saw this year. Do you have any comments to make on that?