Fisheries committee  I'll leave it Luc to start on that question, and then I may add to it. Luc, do you want to go ahead?

Fisheries committee  That isn't really part of our area of expertise and I think the engineers could give you more information about that. I know there are new technologies relating to materials, and composites in particular. Obviously, in the case of the breakwaters, the preferred option is metamorphic rock, the big rocks you see on most wharves.

Fisheries committee  Yes, absolutely. In fact, that is one of our recommendations. There is a certain degree of flexibility in this regard now. There are advisory committees that discuss the various fisheries every year. Obviously, before the fisheries open, there are discussions between the industry and the people who manage the fisheries, mainly to set the opening dates for the fisheries.

Fisheries committee  I would like to mention that we have been relatively lucky, because the storm mainly struck eastern New Brunswick. As Mr. LeBlanc said a little earlier, what causes the most damage is the storm surge. In some cases, for Fiona, the tide was so high that it almost pushed the fishing boats onto the wharves, which meant the owners, the masters, had to park their trucks on the wharf to stop the boats from landing on top of the wharves.

Fisheries committee  Luc, could you add to that question as well?

Fisheries committee  In many cases, for the federal wharves that have not been renovated in recent years, work was done to look into what type of improvements they should be getting in the next few years. In some cases, if they've not been worked on yet, there are plans that they will get some kind of investment in the coming years.

Fisheries committee  That's an excellent point. We've had a meeting in the area recently with the small craft harbour director at DFO.

Fisheries committee  There aren't many of these contractors. That's one thing. The other thing, in some cases, is that they don't have an existing or long-term contract. If there is an emergency and there's no contract open or active with these contractors, they can basically say no. This has happened for us in one particular case with one of our wharves.

Fisheries committee  I would recommend that. The small craft harbours are generally the local fishermen leaders. They know their wharf. They know their channels. They know their area very well—better than anybody else, including myself and Luc. They know the exact things and equipment they need to do the work.

Fisheries committee  Thank you, Mr. Small. I'll probably share that answer with my colleague here, Luc LeBlanc. In the last ten years—and I'll speak for eastern New Brunswick and parts of Nova Scotia on the gulf side—we've had investment in many of our important wharves—those with anything between six and 75 boats per wharf—to raise the height of the ocean walls, the seawalls, and there's also been some work done around the internal wharf infrastructure.

Fisheries committee  In eastern New Brunswick, there are maybe a few of these wharves. There are not many of them left after they were damaged in this area. The trajectory of this storm in particular was especially severe on the Nova Scotia side of things and P.E.I. In our case, we were largely saved by the fact that in the last few years most of our wharves had been invested in.

Fisheries committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the committee, for allowing us the opportunity to present again today on a very important file and the situation on the east coast. My name is Martin Mallet. I'm the executive director at the MFU. I am accompanied today by my colleague, Luc LeBlanc, our fisheries advisor at the MFU.

Fisheries committee  I may start there and mention that there is a grey seal and harp seal quota every year, but it's not being met because we don't have enough hunters out there. We absolutely need to find ways to train new hunters and also maybe subsidize the hunt in different ways so that it's feasible to go out there and actually hunt seals and make a little bit of profit from it while at the same time developing the personal-use or recreational seal-hunting culture across the Maritimes.

Fisheries committee  Same here.

Fisheries committee  I'll repeat what Melanie just mentioned there. A few other options would be to have an e-log program or a paper log program with some dockside monitoring, since it would be a very limited fishery and it would have to be monitored. Louis, do you want to add anything there?