Fisheries committee  I'd just add that I want to talk about trust and the question of whether people have trust in these systems that are put in place to ensure conservation. As scientists, we're just the messengers. The context is that there have been widespread declines in fish habitat and there ha

Fisheries committee  I guess what I would say is, if you go to the doctor and you have a fever, the doctor is going to treat that fever in a certain way. You're going to have your fluids, you're going to go home, and you're going to rest. That's going to be true regardless of what the cause is for th

Fisheries committee  I don't work at that level with the municipalities and whatnot. As a scientist, I mostly work with fisheries to make fishing more sustainable, but I do look at this in a broader sense. I want to paint a picture of the status of conservation in Canada really quickly.

Fisheries committee  In 2014, we did a review of all the species that had been looked at more than once by COSEWIC between 1977 and 2013, which I believe was the cut-off. We found in the freshwater fish that only six species had improved in status over that time period. This has been a long-standing

Fisheries committee  The precautionary principle means that if there's something that is likely to cause a problem—I'm paraphrasing this, essentially—or that you can't be sure it's not going to cause a problem, you do the thing that's less likely to cause an irreversible harm. Precautionary would gen

Fisheries committee  My answer is somewhat similar about the outcomes. I grew up in British Columbia, and now I live in Newfoundland and Labrador. If I broke a federal law in British Columbia, I'd be punished the same way as if I broke that federal law here in Newfoundland and Labrador. Certainly t

Fisheries committee  Yes, this is referring to this idea that there are fish that support a fishery or that you fish, and then there are fish that are essentially not part of that. There are fish that are considered to be irrelevant. This is what I was mentioning earlier about the concern around th

Fisheries committee  It's important to me to not try to read anybody's mind because I can't do that, I'm a scientist. So in terms of what happened and as to what the thought process was as to why these changes were made, all I can do is comment on what the evidence has said about the reasons that wer

Fisheries committee  It's tough to ask about the number of increases of species that have been assessed as being at risk because the number of species assessed goes up over time. What you have to do is look at species that have been assessed more than once and look at whether they've gone up or down

Fisheries committee  Absolutely.

Fisheries committee  We can always get better with that and I think the announcement, recently, that money was going to be put into explicitly data sharing from Fisheries and Oceans Canada, is excellent news. It could well be that this or that needs to be done to the law, but it should be easy for pe

Fisheries committee  The weakening of a law at the higher level doesn't necessarily override the benefits of local stewardship. I don't know a lot about the specific example you're giving me, but its existence doesn't preclude the fact that arguments were correct about the way that the wording was do

Fisheries committee  The original wording was scientifically coherent. The new wording has a lot of scientific problems. As a scientist, I like scientific coherence. The people with experience in law would be better suited to talk about the specific wording on how we can actually make it even better

Fisheries committee  This is a great example of where we need to have better data sharing. Some of the comments that have been made today were only made possible by filings under the Access to Information Act. I'd love to answer your question. If we could have a better database of fish populations ac

Fisheries committee  I'm ready when I'm told to start.