Thank you for your interventions. I think the presentations were really quite enlightening.
I was especially interested, Mr. Meisenheimer, when you said earlier that there's a bit of a struggle between DFO officials and local fishers. They don't necessarily see eye to eye. That's unfortunately very true.
I think what you're bringing, Mr. Purdy—your family, the long history you have, and your knowledge is invaluable. Local communities and local fishers tend to know what's going on, even if DFO seems to sometimes think differently. DFO certainly has their constraints with a precautionary approach. They don't want to go beyond a certain floor, and that's certainly understandable.
What I am also hearing from both of you is that there is a lot of volatility between—the species that are populating our Great Lakes are changing quite dramatically, due largely to the invasive species. It's not from overfishing or because fisheries are not trying to manage their stocks, but because invasive species are forcing them to re-evaluate. That leads me to the question of what is a commercial fishery. We can't think of this in the long term any more. It's always quite short term. From the presentations I've seen recently, we're looking at about a 10-year turnover between what's commercially viable today to what's going to be commercially viable tomorrow. Those are incredibly short periods of time. It's very hard for families and for any community to be able to survive that kind of a transition.
I'm going to bring it back to the fact that we're also talking about changing protections within the Fisheries Act. Article 35—we're going to be scrapping the idea of protecting habitat per se. We're going to be talking about protecting species at risk that are commercially viable. I wonder what that means now. How in the world can we know what's commercially viable if it changes every 10 years? If the Canadian dollar's variations from year to year—that alone could impact what's going to be commercially viable.
DFO is no longer going to be keeping track, essentially, of all fisheries. They are only going to be interested, frankly, in commercially viable fish. How are we going to know what's going to be the commercially viable fish in 10 years? Are the local communities able to predict these things for us? Who is going to do that science?
Do you have any comments on that?