I understand that, but as somebody who, as you know, is a fisheries biologist and represents a large rural area, I think, with all due respect, Mr. Stringer, you're downplaying the impact on municipalities and farmers across the country. We have testimony from the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities, the AAMDC, which is the municipal association in Alberta, and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities will be before us.
I deeply respect your expertise and testimony, but I would say that as somebody who represents the farming and rural constituency and knows pretty much all the farm leaders across the country, the experience with the old Fisheries Act was uniformly bad. I think it's partly because when a DFO officer shows up at a farm meeting with a flak jacket and a pistol.... Of course, we farmers love our guns, but that's a different story. We don't take them to municipal meetings. I would just say, with that experience, that no matter what changes are made to the Fisheries Act now, I would like the department to really reflect on that and ensure that doesn't happen. That's more of a comment.
I'll switch gears here. On a more positive note, with the fact that the department is hiring all of these fisheries scientists, what kind of process will you go through for the allocation of these scientists to the various programs? I think I may be speaking for the entire committee. As you know, we're doing a major study on the northern cod and the Atlantic salmon, two species of tremendous importance. Will you ever possibly see the way to assigning some of these new scientists specifically, a group to Atlantic salmon and a group to northern cod, so they don't just “work on what they want to”? I mean that respectfully because I love doing fisheries, it's great fun, but these are two species that are extremely important. Do you see the possibility of assigning a number of scientists to each one of those species, and that's all that they would work on?