It's very important right now. For many years the ocean was a very stable supporter of salmon. We had many forecasting tools that were accurate to 10% or 20% of any returns. Those are now out by over 100-fold. We actually have many that we don't use anymore.
It's a big challenge, but to be able to decide the best way to move forward and where to invest your money, you have to understand how severe the effect is in the ocean and where this is occurring. As a best-case example, we could address providing more hatcheries if it was just a matter of producing more salmon. However, if you're producing salmon that are going out to the ocean and you know they're not going to survive, you'd be far better off to invest your money in the diversity of habitat restoration programs throughout B.C., support the communities and do small-scale hatcheries to restore community streams. Just as Mr. Temple said, use the community people to get the number of spawners out.
The salmon have multiple habitats, but the only one that affects all salmon is the ocean environment. That's why it's becoming more and more important in people's minds to understand it. To be honest, there's a woefully poor understanding of the connection between climate, oceans and salmon. We simply haven't put the effort into it. It's difficult to do, and Canada is not well prepared to do it because we don't even have a vessel that can do offshore fishing. We have a west coast trawler, but it's part of the Coast Guard. The Coast Guard can't allow it to go out to the central Pacific because it can't get back if there's an emergency, so the research we're doing becomes very expensive because we have to find vessels and the money to fund those vessels.