I beg to differ. The mandate letter relates to his entire duties for his department.
The other point that I wanted to bring up is that time is passing. It's the middle of February now and we have a number of constituency weeks coming up. From my experience on both the environment and the fisheries committees in my first four years, it takes quite a long time to line witnesses up. It's not like you decide on a Tuesday to do a study of fisheries project X and the witnesses are all there on the Thursday.
I think it behooves us to move fairly expeditiously given the time frames. It will be May before we know it, and I think it's quite important that this committee get a number of briefings and studies under its belt, given some of the very serious issues that are facing Canada's fisheries and coastlines.