Fisheries committee  Is that in the U.S. or here in Canada?

Fisheries committee  We represent fishermen in many areas in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, and it depends, I would say, on the LFA. The standard would be between six pots per line, but there are two double lines and one line on each end. That's the maximum we're seeing in some of our areas. In some areas, we have some single traps per line as well.

Fisheries committee  That's for lobster. For snow crab, it's typically one pot per line.

Fisheries committee  These are the smaller snow crab pots. I think that's what you're alluding to. With our science team at MFU, we've done some trials in the past few years, and they are ongoing. We've tried to work with multiple pots per line for the snow crab fishery. We have some limits in terms of how many we can use, because we use smaller boats than the midshore fleet.

Fisheries committee  For lobster, it would be disastrous if we were forced to take all of our traps out of the water for two weeks. We mentioned the shallow water protocol, which seems to be working very well. There have been a few instances in the Magdalen Islands where the shallow water protocol pushed fishermen closer to shore—within 10 fathoms—so they could continue fishing as normal.

Fisheries committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the committee members for allowing us the opportunity to present today. My name is Martin Mallet. I'm the executive director at the MFU. As you just mentioned, I am accompanied today by Mathieu Noël, who in recent years has been our lead on the right whales file, as well as being our snow crab fisheries coordinator.

Fisheries committee  No. It was actually fishers who were out on the water at that time, so the opportunity to collect that data was lost. At the MFU, we managed to set up a small-scale program at the last minute so that a handful of fishers could go out fishing and collect a little bit of data, but it was too little too late.

Fisheries committee  One of the things mentioned is—

Fisheries committee  Thank you for that excellent question, Mr. Cormier. There should definitely be a relief program to support the industry, something that would help harvester organizations restructure certain fisheries and, above all, provide financial assistance to fishers who depend on pelagic fisheries.

Fisheries committee  Absolutely. We've made some progress at that level. I would say that in the last two or three years, in terms of the sonar equipment, we've had some boats set up to start looking at the spring herring stock, for instance. But it's almost 20 years too late.

Fisheries committee  There's a lot of goodwill within the science community in some departments within DFO. There is an acknowledgement that the changes we're seeing in the marine ecosystem right now are very important and moving really fast. The bureaucracy behind changing the way we do science and the funding that's needed to specifically look at fishery science are lacking.

Fisheries committee  I can testify that, over the past 10 years, I've seen more and more ENGOs being represented around the advisory tables in most if not all of our fisheries.

Fisheries committee  They are having some input within these meetings. We know that they are meeting privately with the minister and her office as well. What's being discussed there, we do not know. However, when you look at some of these ENGOs and where they're from, they're funded from international sources in some parts.

Fisheries committee  We've been asking for collaborative science since the foundation of our organization back in 1977. In many cases, we've had success, as I mentioned earlier, with lobster and snow crab. In other instances, it is lacking and it is, I think, the basis of why we have some issues today.

Fisheries committee  In the case of mackerel and any of the species of interest that we fish, we have thousands of boats on the water every year for fishing mackerel or fishing lobster or fishing whatever species. It is a very cheap platform for DFO to use, if they want to, to go out there and gather some more information and data.