Thank you.
In 2012 the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, on the advice of the Canadian groundfish industry on the west coast, with the environmental community, closed enormous amounts of area to bottom trawling. In fact we took 50% of all habitat types in every depth strata, from zero to 200 metres and every 200-metre depth strata all the way out to 1,500 metres, and we closed 50% of the bottom to bottom trawl contact. We also closed off all known areas of coral and sponge. Even though there are still some areas within the fishable area, they put in place a coral and sponge bycatch limit, which for most boats is less than 100 pounds a year, so they avoid those areas.
As Christina said, the actual measures being taken that aren't accounted for under the MPA accounting are quite significant in terms of protection and sustainability measures. If you look at our TACs for groundfish, we under-harvest them by up to 50% annually for most of them. That's not because the fish aren't there. It's because all of the management measures that restrict access to those areas because of protection of habitat or monitoring the integrated management, our weak stock that we have to avoid, means that we can't catch some of the directed harvestable resources there.
Those are all sustainability measures that are very effective to the point that they actually reduce our ability to harvest fish. These aren't accounted for in any of these MPA discussions. They've had significant impacts on the industry. The MPAs are just going to have greater impacts. The part that concerns us is that we're not involved in the measures that, as Jim said, we've already taken but aren't being appreciated or accounted for in the process.