Fisheries committee  The State of New York had been very aggressive in stating that they wanted a much more stringent ballast water policy than what the IMO was going to implement. I'll give you an example—the spiny water flea that I'd mentioned, which is a type of zooplankton. If I were to go out

Fisheries committee  We can come back to it.

Fisheries committee  The Auditor General addressed that question in 2008 and identified what she felt were deficiencies in early detection and rapid response. One of the reasons why Transport, and Fisheries and Oceans, were willing to provide new money for our research network was to specifically add

Fisheries committee  Absolutely. With respect to the ships, I don't think there is any education that needs to be done. What we need there is regulation, if and when it's required.

Fisheries committee  In terms of outreach, the primary group that we work with is called the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters, and I believe you're going to have one of their representatives speak here, if they haven't already. They try to educate boaters on how to prevent aquatic invasive s

Fisheries committee  In certain cases, yes, I think it's certainly a reasonable thing to do, if you know there's a high likelihood the species are going to come in and there is no other way to do it. Some other jurisdictions in the United States—California—is afraid of invasive insects coming in an

Fisheries committee  We did two things. First, we looked at the amount of ballast water that we think is being sourced from different freshwater ports on the St. Lawrence River and is destined for the Great Lakes. The overall amount of water being carried by lakers into the Great Lakes is equal to

Fisheries committee  Okay. So it's a big problem. There are lots of secondary vectors, which is what we would call them, that allow them to spread.

Fisheries committee  In this case in terms of transmitting information, ultimately I am in charge for our research network. We just began a new five-year installment last year of this network. But with our previous one, when we finished that network we came up with, essentially, a book in which we

Fisheries committee  Thank you. It's a huge issue. Some of these species we're dealing with are from the Black Sea basin. You hear the word “sea”, and you say, why are marine species coming into the Great Lakes? They're not strictly marine species. They live in coastal areas, in river outflows in the

Fisheries committee  A very good question. Every time we go out sampling, we collect replicate samples with a tow net. We go from near the bottom of the port to the surface water of the port. The net is one-half metre in diameter. We use two different nets: one that has 80-micrometre mesh, a very fi

Fisheries committee  That's another good question. We're trying to be as comprehensive as possible, because we recognize some species occur in the spring, some occur in the summer, and some occur perhaps in late fall. What we're doing with our research sampling is we're going to each of those 16 po

Fisheries committee  This is why it's expensive.

Fisheries committee  The shipping industry has been very accommodating. They don't like to be portrayed as environmental villains. They know they have a problem. From the time that I first started working with them 10 years ago, even before Transport Canada brought in their regulations in 2006, we ha

Fisheries committee  I'd hate to say that we ought to be regulating those ships because before we regulated the other vessels, we had to determine the risks they posed. That risk, for the Great Lakes at least, was determined largely by the evidence that we saw—that somewhere between 55% and 70% of th