Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to Mr. Huber and Dr. Smith, our guests today.
I want you to know that you are a part of a very important process. This fisheries committee and committees when they work are really the glue between people and their interests and government policy. What we have seen is that the recreational fisheries partnership program, which is very much a focus of our discussions today, raised by my colleagues from all parties and by us, came about because individual members of Parliament, notably Mr. Sopuck and other members of this committee, lobbied to get the program put in place. What it attempts to do is take the concerns raised by you, and by people whom you know and work with, and put them into policy.
Dr. Smith, I want to get right to the heart of a concern that I see commonly raised in my role as a fisheries committee member and a west coast member of Parliament. I represent the riding West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country. You made comments about fisheries officers' smaller footprint on the ground in Alberta.
Just a couple of days ago, we heard a completely different philosophical bias from anglers in Manitoba, who expressed the view that you couldn't have a fisheries officer on every foot of waterway. You need some level of enforcement, but the stronger promotion of habitat comes from enabling the anglers and the recreational community to—I'll quote Shakespeare—take up arms and, by opposing, end the harms and prejudices to the waterways.
Can you comment on that? In your world, where would you put the resources? Would you put them into fisheries officers? Would they bring back the streams, or is it the recreational community that is best able to do that?