Fisheries committee  Every year, ArcticNet pays $2.7 million—it was $2.2 million until recently, but our budget has just been renewed—to operate the Amundsen. This enables us to be at sea. At first, it allowed us 84 days of sea time, which represents two rotations. The rotations are counted as periods of six weeks, or 42 days.

Fisheries committee  Zero. It's what we pay for our program, year in and year out. The industry provides additional funding that enables us to extend the program. The $2.7 million paid by ArcticNet thus corresponds to a completely independent amount. Whether or not we have collaborations and partnerships with the industry, we will pay $2.7 million to charter the Amundsen next year.

Fisheries committee  Yes, the partnership agreement with the oil companies includes the entire scientific program, including the charter of the Amundsen. This enables us to conduct a bigger research program in the Beaufort Sea, which includes the exploration concessions.

Fisheries committee  Yes.

Fisheries committee  Yes.

Fisheries committee  The agreement is for five years, but not for the same amount of work, that is to say that it's only a continuity in order to recover the moorings that are put in place every year in order to have a temporary change in the ecosystem.

Fisheries committee  We're not part of the official approach, if you wish. We're in parallel and we use a different mechanism. We are developing what are called integrated regional impact studies of different regions, one of which is the Beaufort Sea region.

Fisheries committee  The website that we have at this time is called a meta-data site where we have a description of all the data sets that are available. Next year we are going to put the real data. At this time, we have a description of the data sets that have been collected and are available. It's called the Polar Data Catalogue and it's managed in collaboration with the universities, DFO, and different other organizations.

Fisheries committee  Yes. The data that will be loaded in the Polar Data Catalogue will be available to anyone who wants to access it.

Fisheries committee  For free. There's no charge whatsoever. But you have to understand that at this time all the physical data is ready to be loaded on the site, but for much of the biological data, it takes a lot of time to get the information, to sort the samples, and to get the numbers together.

Fisheries committee  Thank you.

Fisheries committee  Thank you, Mr. Blais. That perception is explained in the document I submitted to you. For us, this was a communications disaster because Mr. Robillard's article contains an enormous number of falsehoods and exaggerated and controversial points. It was devastating for us, particularly for the image the Amundsen enjoys and our work with the Canadian public.

Fisheries committee  First of all, I'd like to make a correction. There seems to have been some misunderstanding during the first session this morning. We do not carry out seismic work from the Amundsen. We are not equipped to do that. Again, you need a large ship, a ship that is call a boomer, a large ship that can actually send very strong acoustic signals to the bottom of the ocean to reveal the structure.

Fisheries committee  All the work that is carried out from the Amundsen by ArcticNet or other programs must obtain licences from different organizations, one of them being DFO, for the collection of plankton, for the study of fish, or for different aspects. We also need to have permission and licensing from the Inuit organizations who are responsible for the governance of the region.

Fisheries committee  I had so many beautiful images that I could have shown the committee. It could have been a break during your lunchtime. Sorry about that.