Thank you, Mr. Chair.
And thanks for briefing us today.
I have lots of questions for this five minutes, but I'll go right into the trust issue. I appreciate your candour about that. A couple of things come to mind that fed into that lack of trust. One is that some perceive the priority not as being for wild salmon; it was more for industry development. I think a big one was the absence of adequate research on—I'm talking about salmon aquaculture. Specifically, for many years that became the fallback for the decision-making: “We don't have enough research.” That was DFO.
Unclear accountability between the federal and provincial regimes--that's going to be addressed by this, it sounds like, except that the leases and tenures are so critical to the success of the regime you'll be putting forward.
When you mentioned the dollars, you didn't mention more dollars for research. That seems to me that to have been a huge gap in understanding the risks to wild salmon of our current practices and facilities. Could you tell me how that shortcoming is being addressed? Also, on the issue of priority for wild salmon, how will this regime address the fact that the responsibility for protection of wild salmon and the biodiversity and the responsibility for industry, development, and marketing are in the same department? How will that be handled?
I'm just going to ask all my questions up front.
On benthic layer protection provisions, you said you took some of the regulations pretty much and translated them into your regulations. As to the benthic layer protection provisions in the waste management regulation that was put in about 2003--the parameters for footprint and for the proxy for testing and the mechanisms of who's doing the testing--was there any research as to whether those were working, or did you just adapt it as is and then we'll fine-tune it later?
Just a few questions for your remaining two minutes.