Fisheries committee  Mr. Chair, the reason the fishery is not open right now is that we have a process to go through before we change the date. It's not because we have new information or information to determine a limit reference point. We still are not at a point where we have the information to ha

Fisheries committee  No. Sylvain, do you want to speak to that?

Fisheries committee  They would have to be dead, I believe—

Fisheries committee  Sylvain, do you want to talk through the timing last year?

Fisheries committee  Mr. Chair, as Sylvain said, we have some new things that are going to come to the stock assessment. We have a combined index of the stock state, and we have done some predictive empirical work. As I said earlier, it's a stock on which our information is not as good as we would li

Fisheries committee  We certainly have limited resources, and we have to prioritize how we do that. We look at the size of the different fisheries and their economic importance when we make those decisions. We just can't do everything that we would like to do for every species.

Fisheries committee  Mr. Chair, we can certainly look, and we are looking, at what people think about the idea of opening that fishery on April 1 next year and what that would imply. The advisory committee will discuss this, and if they have a favourable view, it will go to the minister and she can m

Fisheries committee  As the member notes, forage fish are a key element of the food chain. They prey on small marine creatures and then are themselves preyed upon by larger creatures. I want to be clear for the record that certainly harp seals do consume capelin, as capelin is an important part of

Fisheries committee  We certainly have a lot of information about ice conditions. We publish a daily chart on ice conditions, which I look at pretty much every day. I have it right in front of me. The Coast Guard has a whole group of people who do that. It's obviously very important for mariners. Ar

Fisheries committee  We can certainly have an earlier opening for the weir fishers if, as we come out of the advisory committee, that's something that folks are comfortable with...and then the minister currently makes the decision. Yes, we can certainly open the weir fishery earlier.

Fisheries committee  No. For this fishery, once it's open, they can go out and catch as much as they want and take as long to do that as they would like. It is a fishery, though, that only happens for a very short period, so you'd better catch them around the spawning. Once they've spawned, they'll c

Fisheries committee  Tony, do you want to speak to the opening dates for all the different component fisheries here, and how that works?

Fisheries committee  Just to clarify, Mr. Chair, do you mean in terms of fisheries management measures or in terms of getting more data?

Fisheries committee  In terms of fisheries management, Mr. Chair, obviously we can adjust things like opening dates in an effort-based fishery. We can adjust TACs when there are quantitative limits. We can place restrictions around kinds of gear. Those are all fisheries management tools that we hav

Fisheries committee  Our assessments are designed to look at environmental factors. As we have discussed, predation is a factor, so to the best of our ability we try to understand what the predation factors are. They obviously feed into where we think the stock is going and how effective our manageme