Obviously, living on an island, we're very isolated, and our economy is completely dependent on the sea, whether it is for the fishing or the aquaculture industry. Lobster is a primary fishery that we have, so anything that happens to that has a huge impact on the island as a whole.
For us, one of the big things is coming into the beginning of the season, because our season starts in November. It is when right whales are leaving Canadian waters, so you wouldn't tend to see them coming into the Bay of Fundy and lingering in the area and looking for food. If they do, it's very much a transitory trip through the Bay of Fundy, so some of the things that my colleagues have talked about concerning a single whale's transiting shutting down large pieces of the fishery for an extended period of time when, really, the whales aren't there anymore.... We need to look at the duration of the closures and maybe multiple sightings of whales if we are going to have a longer-term closure such as that.
We also have to look at some of the risk factors when we are looking at some of the measures, like Mr. Sullivan has talked about. If you have an area where the fishery takes place where there's very little or no overlap with right whale presence, maybe we don't need to focus as much on the measures in those places but work more collaboratively with fish harvesters, whom I think do have different solutions. However, what works in the Bay of Fundy with our tides probably isn't going to work in the Gulf of St. Lawrence any more than what works in the Gulf of St. Lawrence is going to work in Newfoundland.
We have to move away from having a unilateral approach that will work Atlantic Canada-wide and really look at specific areas to see how the fishery operates there, what can be done in those areas and, really, what needs to be done.