Fisheries committee  Of course, we wouldn't be looking to ACOA to fund research or development work in either Quebec or B.C. We would pursue other avenues and other funding mechanisms for such a model. In terms of the provinces contributing larger amounts, whether or not they would consider such an

Fisheries committee  There's a lot of government funding in the U.S. I'm not aware of a model that's parallel to ours, but a lot of public support, public funding, goes into research and development in the United States.

Fisheries committee  That's a very good question, but there are two key points on that. Again it's the “he said, she said”, but it was never said to the CCFI. The talk is that there was a discussion between ACOA and the Marine Institute, where an ACOA official said this was it and there would be no f

Fisheries committee  Yes, I have.

Fisheries committee  That's a good question. The best example I can give you is the Sea Fish Industry Authority in the U.K. We've done a bit of work with Sea Fish. They actually wrote a letter of support for the centre--they support us that much. We partnered with them on some workshops recently, and

Fisheries committee  If I understand your question correctly, there is a lot of work that would not get done if the centre doesn't continue. I think there's no doubt about it. There are certain things that will continue. I can't say that everything will fall, but there are significant portions.... If

Fisheries committee  We're rapidly running out of time in terms of our existing funding. We're still going through the final stages of all of our year-end funding and crunching numbers on a daily basis. Right now, we have operating funds for the next couple of weeks to a few weeks and that's it. So i

Fisheries committee  I think the suggestion that industry could fund this is challenging. Industry, and all of the members probably know this, is under a tremendous crunch right now. We've got major viability issues in the harvesting and processing sector. Industry will contribute the projects, and y

Fisheries committee  May would be a very accurate timeline, unless there's something forthcoming from the federal government or we find some other avenues. May would certainly be a very realistic timeline for us, and probably not the end of May as it stands right now.

Fisheries committee  A little, yes.

Fisheries committee  I don't know a great deal about the centre. What I will say is that two weeks ago I attended a meeting at NSERC, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, on capture fisheries and some of the support they're providing to those fisheries. There was a gentlem

Fisheries committee  Absolutely, that's something we would most definitely love to pursue, and it would certainly fit within our scope and mandate.

Fisheries committee  I think it's important. Obviously, to be fair to ACOA, we've had a good working relationship with them—certainly at the officials level, and even at the senior management level. Of course, that relationship has been strained a bit in the last couple of months; but that's normal w

Fisheries committee  I have a very quick response to that. Our leverage rate is about five to six to one. Actually, I didn't present this, but if we look at the last year, where we had short-term funding through the Innovative Communities Fund, our leverage rate was seven to one. Because we had such

Fisheries committee  The request to ACOA is $1 million per year. We've requested this for the next five years. If somebody comes back and says, listen, five years is not realistic, we need to look at a three-year arrangement, those are issues that you can discuss legitimately. We'd like to have some