Thank you, Chair.
It's great to be here. I'm not a member of this committee, and I have tell you, too, that I don't know a whole lot about fishing. I bought a fishing boat this spring, for the first time. My riding is Chatham-Kent—Leamington, which has the largest freshwater fishing port in the world. I feel I have at least some right to be here, I guess, in that respect.
But I have to tell you, I'm the average Canadian, and I too am repulsed when I see these pictures. I think you have a little bit of a problem with just perception, and let's face it, the world is mostly perception.
Mr. McIsaac, I appreciate what you said about the runoff. I didn't know that—all these things we don't know—but when I see pictures of deep-bottom trawling, I do wonder why we are doing that.
Dr. Ban, you mentioned something that I had never thought about, the fact that there are different levels, with young fish, what we'd call baby fish or baby crabs or something. I would suspect that they rely on the fish that are being caught—this is just an assumption—and the bits and pieces that drop to the bottom; that's what they eat. If those big guys are gone, then the little guys can't eat.
These are all things that we start to pick up, as the Canadian public, and then we start pushing those buttons. That is our perception.
So why do we do bottom trawling at all? Why is that allowed?