Fisheries committee  No, we don't have any contracts with the states. The states' responsibilities are the same as those of the Province of Ontario. They have fishery management jurisdiction responsibilities. They perform that function through the lake committees process, which we established in 1965

Fisheries committee  That's correct.

Fisheries committee  Well, we have a legal decision, a legal opinion, on a conflict of interest. That's now in the package for you to read. I do want to clarify that DFO doesn't receive money from Parliament just for sea lamprey control. It receives money for the entire suite of programs that the c

Fisheries committee  That's only been clarified this year. As Mr. Goodyear pointed out, we now have a memorandum of understanding that's much clearer than what we've ever had in the past. We do have much more accountability in how the sea lamprey control program funding will be spent going forward.

Fisheries committee  We're basically dealing with two issues. We're dealing with, obviously, the lack of codification as to how this should function. Whoever is the portfolio manager, there needs to be a codification of that, because that's part of the problem. It's failed miserably, and there have b

Fisheries committee  I can only restate what I said. The commission is about more than just sea lamprey control. The convention is very clear on what the role of the fishery commission is. Coordination of the binational sea lamprey control program is definitely one of the three pillars of the manda

Fisheries committee  No, the convention says that we are to use agencies of government or individuals on the street corner to deliver our programs, if we can. One of the articles is pretty clear. We're actually—

Fisheries committee  Mr. Chair, that's a great question. It gives us an opportunity to clarify that. When we talk about a change in machinery of government, we never talked about using anybody other than DFO as the sea lamprey control agent. To finish off the question that I was trying to answer ea

Fisheries committee  That's correct. It was up until 2022.

Fisheries committee  Canada, as a party to the agreement, was underfunding for that period, yes.

Fisheries committee  Yes. As we were saying, we've been trying to resolve this problem for a long time. This is not new.

Fisheries committee  That's correct. We've done a lot of political outreach since 2018. From 2018 to about 2019 or early 2020, I would characterize it as being about five false starts with the department when trying to resolve this internally.

Fisheries committee  Well, they had no value, because we lost time, essentially. We did a lot of political outreach going forward from about 2019, and that's when things started to change.

Fisheries committee  As Commissioner Baker said, we're looking to the future. There's been a conscious decision not to pursue that deficit. In actual fact, we were able to use the U.S. contributions to keep the lights on, so to speak. We're looking to the future. We're actually encouraged by the dis

Fisheries committee  The quick answer is no.