Fisheries committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'd like to thank the committee for the invitation to come and speak today. It is an honour and privilege to do so. I'm here today to talk about the future of the fishery for northern cod. My name is Dr. Brett Favaro and I'm a research scientist at the

Fisheries committee  We're all our own cinematographers out there. That was all video that we collected over the course of our studies.

Fisheries committee  I think this is where we have to be very careful. With my work, I'm always out on the water with folks and talking to people in different places. It's hard to disentangle what you're seeing in front of you from what the broad trends are. I try to explain this to fishermen, too.

Fisheries committee  This is one of the exciting things about pots. They're probably among the most controllable of fishing gear, meaning that you can make escape panels, you can change the entry size, you can make the entry rigid, or you can make it soft. If it's rigid, you set a maximum size for th

Fisheries committee  This is exactly one of the things we need to replicate in Newfoundland and Labrador to see to what extent they can survive, how that is related to depth, and how that is related to body size. In other words, are big or small ones more likely to survive?

Fisheries committee  When I say “scalable”, I mean that you can fish with one pot, you can fish with 25 pots, which is what we used for our study, and you can fish with more than that. For example, when they're fishing spot prawns in British Columbia, there are 500 pots on a boat. The action of fishi

Fisheries committee  We were using 24-hour soaks. I mentioned the storm problem with gillnets if you can't get out and haul the gillnets. With pots what we find is if there's a storm, then you can leave them out for two or three days. The fish are still fine when you bring them up.

Fisheries committee  There are two aspects to that. One is the direct impact of the fishing gear—for example, trawl nets on the sea floor—but there's also just the fact that when you lock yourself into a quantity-based fishery where you're getting low amounts for every kilo or pound of cod that you l

Fisheries committee  That's a great question with a complicated answer, because right now we're in the prototype phase for a lot of these. We built them by hand. I mean, it's conceivable that you could get these things down to the low hundred-dollar range. It depends where you want to get them built.

Fisheries committee  We spend a couple of weeks a year up there and we have a research team up there a little bit longer than that. We go there for when the commercial fishery opens, during that time, but we go up at other times a year as well just to check in with the local harvesters and see what p

Fisheries committee  I'll put it this way, the weekly quota for fishing vessels on Fogo Island is 2,000 pounds a week. We were getting 2,000 pounds a day. If it were more efficient, then maybe you could fish for less than a day. It's not making a huge material difference in the labour that goes into

Fisheries committee  To mitigate that, you can put in a biodegradable panel. You can work in some twine that will actually degrade when it's been in the water for too long. If you do lose the pot, it actually opens up and the fish can swim out over time. That isn't to say that there's no impact of ha

Fisheries committee  I have a really quick add-on to that. The way we do that type of research really matters. When we're on Fogo Island, we're talking to the community and letting them participate in the research. Getting them involved is a really good way to help people develop their own scientific

Fisheries committee  Handlines certainly have a role on the artisanal side of things, where they've fetched a good market price for their fish and sold them to fine restaurants as well. The Government of Newfoundland and Labrador earmarked $2 million towards what I think they call their “groundfish

Fisheries committee  I'm ready when I'm told to start.