Fisheries committee  No. But as he mentioned, all this information is provided when we do the peer review meeting. The industry is participating, so they have a chance to see the number, ask the questions, so they see the same trends we're predicting. And all this information is tabled publicly befor

Fisheries committee  No, there isn't. You know, the experts are in the field, and they know exactly what would be required to do more. We certainly know that understanding more about natural mortality and reproduction and growth processes would be of benefit, but those are all additional studies that

Fisheries committee  We have all kinds of monitoring activities to look at salinity, temperature, currents, and so on. The big challenge is that while the department embraced an ecosystem approach about four or five years ago, to be frank, it's a worldwide effort. Everyone's trying to start to unders

Fisheries committee  I'd like to tell you a little about the precautionary approach that has been embraced. Getting this approach applied to fisheries management decisions has been an amazing victory for us because historically, there were no so-called critical, cautious or healthy stock status zones

Fisheries committee  In other words, if stock levels remain at a minimum of 38,000 tonnes and never fall below that threshold, there are no limits on the amount of fishing that can be done, provided this threshold, or boundary, is respected. This year, since stock levels moved into the critical zone

Fisheries committee  I will start to answer your question and then I will let the expert address the specifics. First of all, it is important to understand that the snow crab program is one of the most robust and comprehensive scientific fishing programs that we have. Of all the programs, it has th

Fisheries committee  Let me just say that this is not the only stock to have declined significantly. Shrimp stocks have also declined dramatically. Stocks of norther gulf cod are also down significantly this year. Some environmental conditions are beyond our control. One of the limitations we must co

Fisheries committee  If we take into consideration biomass variability, we see that around 1996, stocks totalled 103,000 tonnes. Levels have declined to 58,000 tonnes. We do not control the extent to which stock levels vary. Scientific evaluations may or may not allow us to gauge these variations. So

Fisheries committee  Sorry to add more to this. I guess that biomass is one of the indicators we use, but we also use other indicators, like the CPU, the catch per unit effort. If we didn't have the same trend for many indicators, we could say that the biomass itself was wrong. But suddenly when the

Fisheries committee  The department has been putting in more than this $2 million. We have other funds like those in the habitat program and the fisheries management programs where we can actually devote some of those resources to direct watershed action. We have the smallmouth bass issue in Miramic

Fisheries committee  That was introduced. There is currently an action plan being developed jointly with the province to take some action. Some of the funding to do this is coming from funding pots other than this limited $4 million due to the fact that this is an expanding sector of activity.

Fisheries committee  What happened five years ago when we had the first plan is that we sat down with the provinces and developed a full action plan with numerous actions. Then, what the government decided to do was to invest in prevention, because when the different species are established, it's ver

Fisheries committee  The interesting thing about the lobster program is that it has been developed in close cooperation with the industry. There is very significant cooperation. As there are no quotas, there is less tension over the establishment of biomass and so on. Fishing equipment and egg produc

Fisheries committee  Yes.

Fisheries committee  Possibly, but as the Fisheries Resource Conservation Council brought up, and as you yourself mentioned, climate change and the effect on the ice are factors now. There are also prey-predator issues. So we are now in a time when science is being rewritten. Previously, programs wer