Transport doesn't have a research arm, unlike DFO, but what Transport has done is they have provided funding to research groups to try to get work done that they feel needs to be done.
We have been working with Transport funding for up to 10 years now. When Transport came up with their 2006 ballast water regulation, it was based on work that our group and a complementary group in Ann Arbor, Michigan, had been working on together for about 10 years. We determined that by looking at ships coming in with salt water, brackish water, or fresh water in their ballast tanks, we were able to determine the diversity and abundance of organisms.
We found that if the ships came in with salt water in the tanks, the diversity of threatening organisms—meaning those that could survive in the Great Lakes—was dramatically lower. We made note of that and informed both the shipping industry and Transport Canada. Transport Canada then took the initiative to require this open ocean flushing for all vessels coming into Canada. I think it's a great policy. I think it has been largely mimicked around the world now because it's effective.
I should also say that when we determined some of our genetic costs, this work that I just described to you, there were two downsides to it. As I mentioned, in many cases we can't put a name to the species that we find. We know they're bona fide species, but we don't know what they are yet. We can keep records of these and then in the future, as more and more species get genetically bar coded, we can go back and we can put names to those species.
The second problem is that it is very expensive to do this work. Each sample costs us about $10,000 to run. In most laboratories in Canada the professor may have $50,000 per year, so you're not going to get very far.
The nice thing about the network is that Transport gives us money and we can use that money to run samples. We're actually analyzing samples from 16 ports: four from the Great Lakes, four from the east coast, four from the west coast, and four from the Arctic. So we're doing complementary work across the country.