Thank you for that question, because I'd like to bring up some experience we've had with DFO.
After the Baum and Fuller report “Canada's Marine Fisheries: Status, Recovery Potential and Pathways” came out in 2016, DFO Pacific science worked with us. We actually developed what we called a “fishery science reporting system” that addresses the recommendations from that report and addresses some of the comments here from the other witnesses. In fact, it provides scientific information, trajectory information about species, economic value, abundant species, life-cycle information, geography, etc. It also links to all of the open data, both in the federal government and in academic publications.
We developed it. Because we are a big data enterprise, we were able to develop this tool. We were on to phase three and there has been no action since 2018. We see this as a national tool that could begin to open this transparency. It would begin to look like what the U.S. NOAA does in their fishery service. They actually have a very open and transparent delivery of data across all species, called Stock SMART. This would allow all of us to have that information, including the lack of assessment data, which I think has been brought up here again.
I think this could be a way forward. We'd be happy to work again with Fisheries and Oceans science across the country to advance this tool, to open up that transparency, so that everyone understands on both the social science side and the hard science side what the gaps are in that information and what kind of risks we are taking in making these decisions.
I also want to touch on the fact that there was a comment about where we bring in the fishers themselves. There's a model in the U.S. called Sea Grant where, in fact, they are really funding regionally the interests of the fishers—what science they need to help them advance their economic benefit. That might be a model to look at going forward.
Finally, I'd like to comment on the fact that we will not have a lot of ships to capture a lot of these data in the open ocean and in some of the coastal areas, and we are not now moving forward with looking at systems, autonomous surface vehicles, because we can no longer afford to operate these vessels with people on board. This is the future and it's been advancing in the past three years. There are many publications on how these autonomous vehicles are now being used for stock assessment and understanding of evolution of species as the climate changes.
Thank you.