Fisheries committee  Anytime you put a closure in place, you have fish coming in and fish going out. Halibut move both shallow and deep during the year, so when you put an RCA in shallow, which tends to be where they are, the halibut that have moved in there over the last couple of months have not be

Fisheries committee  That was the point that Stephen just made. You have to make these things really large to get that long-term benefit within the area, but then the larger you make it the less spillover you get to benefit fisheries. Basically, the bigger they are, the more they're taking away from

Fisheries committee  It's very difficult, because as you make these things bigger, you start forcing fishermen into a smaller and smaller area. Then you get multi-species issues going on where you get higher bycatch rates because everybody is shifting around. On the west coast, as I was saying, it'

Fisheries committee  We haven't been very successful at that anywhere, in predator control, introducing predators to control things. A lot of those things have gone badly in wildlife management. There is more and more attention being paid to culling marine mammals because the marine mammal protection

Fisheries committee  No.

Fisheries committee  As part of the study that we were working on, there was a group out of the St. John's office that was studying links between capelin and northern cod. It's an interesting—

Fisheries committee  I could look it up for you, yes.

Fisheries committee  You can very easily enforce marine protected areas for commercial fisheries. As I mentioned, on the west coast they're all tracked. I'm not sure what it is on the east coast. I think they're working on VMS systems on the east coast, but you can always detect when a commercial ves

Fisheries committee  I think that if you were to do something like that, you would always want to consider an alternative of reducing the fishing mortality. As I've mentioned, we have a lot of stocks that are pretty heavily exploited, and a lot of times I don't see the benefit of a spacial closure ve

Fisheries committee  I agree. It's always good to look at how other countries are doing things. I think you would also look at the structures that are in place to help them do what they're doing. Australia, for instance, has a fisheries management authority that's at arm's length from government. Tha

Fisheries committee  You're looking at me.

Fisheries committee  I don't know this area at all.

Fisheries committee  Species, sizes....

Fisheries committee  I have a couple. There's a general rule in fisheries stock assessment, population dynamics, and so on that you cannot know the optimal size of a stock until you overfish it. Letting a stock grow to its largest size tells you nothing about the optimal productivity of that stock.

Fisheries committee  The only way to sample fish is to pull them up to the surface, so you need a net, or you need hooks, traps, or whatever it is that fish will go into. We have an entire sablefish fishery on the west coast that's one of the most valuable in Canada. It's highly selective because onl