I'm sorry, Chair. I will speak more slowly.
We were talking about the hundreds of thousands of eyes and ears from first nations to commercial to Canadian anglers, who believe they can help identify and report infractions.
I'll just give you one example as it relates to these challenges around capacity. In the world of reporting fisheries' infractions, DFO off-loaded its observe, record, report line to a third party years ago.
BCWF members found it nearly impossible to get in touch with DFO officers or even the operators at the observe, record, report line to report infractions, and they were often only able to leave voice mail hoping someone would return their call. In our conversations with DFO biologists, it turns out they had the same result. They could not get through the observe, report, record line to report infractions.
As a result, the BCWF created a conservation app, which allows reporting of infractions via your smart phone. When we went to implement the app, we experienced significant adversity from DFO, the issue being that compliance and protection knew they could not meet public expectations.
Well, times have changed, and so has our relationship with compliance and protection. Adoption has been approved. I will leave you with the thought that Canada's compliance and protection agency did not want the public to have the ability to report infractions on their smart phones, because it did not have the capacity to deal with those reports.
I believe the committee has a number of questions to ask DFO compliance and protection around historical data related to officers on leave, turnover and the number and dates of night patrols and helicopter and boat patrols, on both the lower and middle Fraser River. This would give the committee a better temperature check on the changing effectiveness and culture within compliance and protection as it relates to illegal, unreported and unregulated fisheries.
Thank you.