Thank you.
We have a tool that's available to fish harvesters electronically to allow them to easily report lost fishing gear promptly. When that report is done or submitted by a fish harvester, the department receives that report, and we process that report as soon as possible to determine if there's a retrieval activity by the department or through our partners that can happen in the near term.
As my colleague Adam Burns mentioned, we've had a ghost gear retrieval program that's been in place for the last two years. There was another announcement for $10 million to retrieve additional gear with our partners, including indigenous harvesters, commercial harvesters and experts in retrieving gear, and once those reports are submitted, we use them to retrieve gear. The challenge is that sometimes the gear can't be retrieved and sometimes it can be, and in some cases the harvesters are, in season, able to retrieve the gear themselves, so sometimes the amount of gear reported lost doesn't end up being the amount of gear that's left in the water.
Our goal is to retrieve all of that gear, of course, because lost gear—and this is something Canada has mentioned in the international community as well—is a major source of impact for marine mammals, including endangered whale species, so working with our industry to retrieve that gear is a priority.