Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, gentlemen and Dr. Wheatley, for being here. This is an important issue and we need to understand it a little bit better. We have made some progress today, I think, so thank you for that.
Let me raise two issues. I want to follow up on the last one in a moment, but before that, my understanding is that the Great Lakes Commission, which is kind of a binational organization between the states and the provinces—Ontario and Quebec in this case—an organization that cares about these issues, and the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence cities initiative got together in 2010, got some money from funders, and started working on this issue, among others. Earlier this year they produced and released a report and they called it “Restoring the Natural Divide”. I think the report is pretty clear where they're going with this.
The report is somewhat pessimistic, I would say, about the effectiveness of the electric barrier that currently we largely depend on for the Asian carp, for example, to be kept out of the Great Lakes. For example, they say the barrier is incomplete, costly to maintain, and vulnerable to failure. It's their opinion, in the report, that eventually it will fail and eventually we will be working on mitigation rather than prevention. The report, in substance, makes the recommendation that there needs to be a physical barrier between the Mississippi River basin and the Great Lakes. So the report is about engineering possibilities and how much it might cost, but it also talks about what the cost would be if you don't build this and eventually you're engaging in mitigation.
I'm not sure it's a fair question to ask, whether you have any opinion about this. You've probably been monitoring to some degree the electric barrier and its effectiveness, although already we've found DNA on the other side of the barrier, so that might be a hint about where that's going. But do you have any comment on this report, if you've had a chance to read it yet, and whether you think that at the end of the day the solution has to be a physical separation between the Great Lakes and the basin?