Thank you, Minister.
The work that the department is engaged in is restructuring the organization previously known as Habitat. It will now be known as the fisheries protection program, as you have indicated.
We are going to go from a highly distributed footprint under which we had approximately 68 habitat offices, many of which had one or two people in them, down to 15 offices. They will be consolidated in all of the major capitals, if you will, in centres across the country. In so doing we will allow ourselves to more effectively concentrate our resources, establish stronger management controls, and ensure greater consistency and coherence across the program to ensure that the work of the program is directly focused on the protection of commercial, recreational, and aboriginal fisheries and their habitat.
The organization is being restructured into a series of what we call fisheries protection units. We are grouping experts along the lines of development-type projects. For example, we will have a group on oil, mining, and gas, and those sorts of things. I won't describe the entire org chart because time doesn't allow that, but essentially the focus is on creating a triage unit, into which project proposals would come. They would be directed into a particular fisheries protection unit for assessment and moved forward.
The bottom line from our perspective is that it's not a little tweak, it's not a touch on a lever or a dial, but a restructuring of the program to align the delivery with the new provisions of the act.