Fisheries committee  Some of them do. You probably haven't met very many of them.

Fisheries committee  Yes, I've heard that.

Fisheries committee  Sorry, I shouldn't have said that. The regulations don't deal with closed containment directly, in the sense that you won't find the words “closed containment” in there. However, if an operation were to set up, say, tomorrow in a closed containment proposal, they'd first have to get a licence to do that.

Fisheries committee  It's a better turn of phrase than I used. Shall I interpret that as a question about closed containment?

Fisheries committee  Right.

Fisheries committee  I think they are very much so, and they are very much, as I mentioned, designed with the ability to regulate it in the future. If it comes to pass, then I think we're in a good position to regulate that kind of activity, but not to require it.

Fisheries committee  With apologies to skeptics, the answer is very much yes. I think that for the most part, many people in the industry very much took the view that DFO moving into this management role would be a positive thing for the industry. I think that many of the environmental organizations we've dealt with certainly felt, and I think still feel, very much the same way.

Fisheries committee  No new sites will be approved as part of the transition to the federal authority. If there are new site applications in the process now, which there are--there are seven--those will not just simply be approved as a movement into the federal system. So the province has stopped the adjudication process for those seven new licence applications.

Fisheries committee  With respect to the first part of that question, the province had a new site application process that was very extensive. They spent a lot of time ploughing through the new site applications. Typically, they're looking at between four and seven years for approving a new site, and several of the new site applications were well down that track.

Fisheries committee  In terms of our relationship with the province, at the beginning of this process we expected that given the nature of the transition and the major change, the bureaucrats, in particular my counterparts, would be somewhat resistant. It's a big change. There is a lot of programming left, and so on.

Fisheries committee  Super-duper.

Fisheries committee  Mr. Blais, one of the things I would say in my second crack at this is in the context of the public workshops that we've held. I've stood at the front of a room in Campbell River for two and a half days and listened to people tell me that DFO and the people who work for it are not to be trusted.

Fisheries committee  I'll just answer the last part of your question first. The way we structured our proposal for resources was to do an almost forensic audit of the provincial program to determine how many people they had in place to administer their program, how many operating resources they had, how much equipment they had, and so on.

Fisheries committee  Sir, they are a mix of three. There are some that are federally run, not very many--

Fisheries committee  There are a small number of them. There are some that are provincially run and there are some that are a mix. They fall into multiple categories. Their administrative structure is such that it's very difficult to say: here is the standard approach; it looks like this. There is quite a mix of them.