Madame Gill, thank you for the question.
I think this is important, and maybe I should have said this up front.
I've been working on some graduate research for the last seven years around funding for natural resource management. This is very germane. In terms of the role of science, if you want good policy and good science, you put scientists in charge of those research questions. There's huge value....
Everybody has referred to Washington state. Let's start with where Washington state's money comes from. They get $600 million in hydro compensation. The NOAA shows up with over $1 billion, and the fishing wildlife budget is $220 million. They have orders of magnitude more than what we have in B.C.
For the science piece under that, the strategic avenue through that is that we have all of these public servants who are called “professors” who have students who are exceptionally intelligent. Quite frankly, we don't pay them a lot to go out and do work. That is the place to run science out of. It's to offload a bunch of these questions onto academics and people who can put you in front of the answers.
I certainly am concerned when I see things internalized inside of DFO, because I'm very well aware—and the ATIP shows—that quite often, if the answers don't line up with what managers want or what the top end of DFO wants, the science doesn't see the light of day. I think that's where the independent piece around science goes, even in terms of the secretariat. Having people who are great scientists and who are outside of the DFO world in charge of these research questions is definitely where the investment should go.