It's unfortunate. Smallmouth bass is a great sport fish that we have in the St. John area or the southeast of the province. It's been there for a hundred years. It's not native to our province, but people have been moving it within the province into lakes or areas they shouldn't be, because these fish will threaten native species of salmon. We don't know the effect. We don't know how long. We just know that the salmon aren't bred, or they don't have the genetics, to defend themselves against a new predator. This is a concern of ours. The Fisheries Act has changed and we don't have the regulatory means to fix a problem. We have a threat to our Atlantic salmon in one particular lake and we do not have the regulatory means to eradicate that fish.
DFO and the Department of Natural Resources have been containing these fish for five years now, and what we find is that there are more young every year than we started with. We have fewer fish in the lake, but we have more smaller fish, which means they're still breeding. The eradication plan of electrofishing and gill netting is not working. We need to eradicate them chemically. We need to get rid of that threat in the Miramichi area. It's difficult for me to say on the one hand that it's good to have smallmouth bass in one area because it's a great fishery—a world-class one, I would say. I'm not part of that, but I know individuals who participate in that sport. I'm not one of them, but I know it exists. I don't want to say it's not wonderful, but to move it to another area could be detrimental to our Atlantic salmon, which already has a lot going against it now at sea. At sea we have a problem, and here we find in the pristine area that the rivers are healthy except that we might not be able to fix the threat if we don't get onto it soon.
So that's this....