Environment committee  Sure, I'd be more than happy to do so. One thing I didn't touch on but that is in the written presentation the committee members will have is that we strongly agree that public awareness and education should be a key component of the NCP. For many years we've gone to committee

Environment committee  I can certainly provide this committee with the invasive species public education and awareness proposal we gave to the fisheries and oceans committee ast week. We'd be more than happy to send this committee a copy of that, which outlines exactly how it works on the ground. I mig

Environment committee  Certainly more money is always a great idea, but there are a number of things the plan could recommend. I want to be really clear about this. When we talk about things like wildlife diseases, and we talk about habitat, and we talk about invasive species, these are issues we've

Environment committee  I'll try to be brief again. I won't answer “yes” this time. I can give you some basic examples in a very short fashion. The invading species awareness program is on the ground across this province. We have 27 summer students that we hire as a hit squad in every corner of this

Environment committee  I'm not sure that the government needs to, based on what we are hearing from Fisheries and Oceans Canada, what we're hearing from the minister and his staff, and officials at the department now. We continue to ask questions about what the changes to the act are going to look like

Environment committee  Yes. I can't be any briefer than that.

Environment committee  Thank you for the question, Ms. Leslie. Yes, we do. We've had a number of consultations recently and several face-to-face meetings with the current Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, Mr. Ashfield, over proposed changes to the Fisheries Act in the budget implementation bill, and w

Environment committee  Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, members of the committee, and fellow panellists. On behalf of the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters, our 100,000 members, and 675 member clubs across the province, I am pleased to have the opportunity to appear before you today to comment on the

Fisheries committee  People indicated they would like follow-ups on two or three things, and we will certainly get them to the clerk for all members of the committee expeditiously.

Fisheries committee  Thank you very much.

Fisheries committee  I'll speak to the generalities, and then I'll let Dr. Quinney refer to the actual percentages. If you go through them one by one, for Lake Erie, the spawner abundance estimate is nearly six times the target range, and although it's lower than the record high abundance observed d

Fisheries committee  I cannot speak to the sea lamprey or the Asian carp, but to give you an example, three or four years ago the potential for round goby getting into Lake Simcoe was identified. Of course Lake Simcoe in Ontario had been the focus of a lot of activity in terms of its water quality an

Fisheries committee  I would like to point out—and I'm not suggesting by pointing this out that we need to go down the same path—that I don't think a year goes by when we do not see before Congress and the Senate in the U.S. an invasive species bill brought forward in that House that is sponsored by

Fisheries committee  It depends on which species you're talking about. Seven years ago zebra mussels were pretty well established by then. Unfortunately, gobies were reasonably well established by then. Asian carp wasn't really on the horizon very much at that point in time because they had not yet n

Fisheries committee  That's correct. We have already developed in Ontario a program that we deliver on the ground now, but our biologists, our invasive species staff, have for many years had in hand a program we could tailor to other provinces. The offer we made, going back to 2003, was that we wou