Fisheries committee  Thank you, and good morning. I'm happy to see you again. It's pretty dark out here. It's early in the morning. It's been about six months since I testified to you about this very subject. I'm really pleased to be here again to celebrate all the action on marine protection of th

Fisheries committee  Yes.

Fisheries committee  I think it's taking far too long right now.

Fisheries committee  I think the government is taking too long if it takes seven years on average to create one MPA. That's a really long time. In Australia, the grandfather of all marine protected areas, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park—

Fisheries committee  No, I didn't say that.

Fisheries committee  No. I said seven years is too long. That's what I said.

Fisheries committee  I'm not sure I would agree with the premise of that question. In terms of the foreign funding, I think that a lot of extremely large charitable foundations in the United States—and there are a lot of them, way more than we have in Canada—are interested in protecting the environme

Fisheries committee  The majority of the Gordon and Betty Moore funding goes to the U.S.

Fisheries committee  They spend their money globally. They have a lot of money to spend. Gordon Moore was one of the founders of Intel. He has a lot of money, just like a lot of the other big U.S. foundations. The Rockefeller brothers are selling their oil. These are big sources of money. They pick h

Fisheries committee  Yes. I think that committee did a very thorough study. It's 120 pages long. They heard from a number of witnesses. They took a site visit out to B.C., and maybe the Arctic, too, I'm not sure, and they made a number of recommendations. The part that interested me was the part abou

Fisheries committee  Yes, and they are allowed now in almost all MPAs. It's just the size of the zone that you allow the fishing in. Ocean is different from land, as Dr. Cox said. The trend is to multi-zoned MPAs, but the largest part of the zone of that special area that's for protection should be f

Fisheries committee  Yes. Definitely look at MPAs, not just fisheries management around the world. Look at how much progress people have made very quickly—Australia, the U.K., the EU, South Africa, and many other countries.

Fisheries committee  I think my colleague referred to a study that just came out from the Scottish government that showed that the socio-economic impacts were not as great as predicted, so I'll look to that study. They've established a lot of MPAs in Scotland over the past five years, I think, and th

Fisheries committee  At least 75% of an area should be free, but yes, I'm referring to the fact that some fishing communities also want MPAs to protect their valuable fishing resources.

Fisheries committee  The 75% rule is according to IUCN guidance, and in almost every single one of the 10 MPAs established under Canada's Oceans Act, I think, there is fishing. There is a core zone, maybe, that's a no-take zone, but there are zones around in which fishing carries on.