Fisheries committee  One of the responses of Fisheries and Oceans to the Auditor General's audit was the creation of a centre called CEARA, the Centre of Expertise for Aquatic Risk Assessment, and it's based in Burlington, Ontario. Before you can ban the sale of these organisms.... This is trade, and

Fisheries committee  No, you can do it before it comes in.

Fisheries committee  No. We had concern about Asian carp, so CEARA did a risk assessment before the Asian carp were introduced in large numbers to Canada. They said that they thought that these fish were a threat to Canada; therefore, they have a legal ability to prohibit live possession. Then Ontari

Fisheries committee  I saw them in 2010 at a number of locations. In 2011 a woman who lives on one of the tributaries out in Belle River, Ontario, outside of Windsor sent me a whole series of photographs and said that they couldn't navigate boats through their little waterway because it was choked wi

Fisheries committee  I have one. I read in the newspaper this morning that two people have been charged with bringing Tamil refugees to Canada a couple of years ago onboard two vessels. I wrote the Minister of Public Safety at the time. I think I should have written the Minister of Transport. We need

Fisheries committee  A good friend of mine, a dentist, has a nice pond. So does my brother-in-law, who is also a dentist. They both have these plants in their gardens out in the backyard. The problem is that they grow so prolifically when it's warm that if they put a plant in their pond, a month late

Fisheries committee  Excellent question. There are case studies we can look at. I can cite two where I know they've been very successful. There's an animal called the black-striped mussel, it's like a zebra mussel; it attaches to things. They found it in a port in Australia. The cordoned off the port

Fisheries committee  I'm not sure if Transport would be the appropriate group. DFO has hired a number of research scientists over the past decade explicitly to work on invasive species issues. Now I wouldn't say that it's their sole responsibility to go out and count samples like this, but very cle

Fisheries committee  We can't go back to the way things were, but there's a thing in toxicology called the dose-response relationship. Essentially, if I expose an organism to a certain dose of chemical, what's the response going to be with the chemical? We can do the same thing in invasion biology. I

Fisheries committee  Thank you very much. I applaud your knowledge of Greek. “Limnos” is the Greek root for “standing water”, so limnology is the study of standing waters. The award is named after a gentleman named Frank Rigler, who was a prominent limnologist first at the University of Toronto an

Fisheries committee  That's an excellent point. Yes, it could. We find that these zebra and quagga mussels are what we call “ecosystem engineers”. They change physical aspects of the habitat, chemical aspects of the habitat, and the biology of the systems. They have literally transformed the way the

Fisheries committee  As I mentioned, the U.S. does not have this systematic approach that we're using. We met with the science agency called the NSF a couple of weeks ago to see if they would be willing to fund American colleagues so that they could do the type of work we're doing. A number of other

Fisheries committee  In the study that I mentioned we're doing—with the shipping company going down to Brazil—we're trying to determine whether or not, if we did this for transoceanic vessels coming into Canada, this could provide us with another level of protection. We haven't suggested that we sh

Fisheries committee  Some form of treatment might be required. If we can demonstrate—

Fisheries committee  I really don't work on the treatment side, but there are probably 15 different approaches, some of which are patented, that—