Fisheries committee  If I may, I'll answer your second question first. I think that within the current management plans of DFO there is that built-in flexibility so that we can change zonation and take and no-take regulations. In parallel, there is an interest in monitoring, but what I don't see in

Fisheries committee  Absolutely, and I think that's a very important point. I think there's a third piece to this, in that it's been shown globally that the creation of marine protected areas can actually help fishery stocks increase by providing essentially no-take areas for fish to feed and to rep

Fisheries committee  A couple of points are related to that. First of all, by protecting areas for fish to reproduce, there's spillover into the surrounding areas, and there the fish can be harvested—not exploited.

Fisheries committee  Second, my experience with MPA management plans, in working with DFO, is that these are made up on a rotating basis of around five years, so that during those five years we can create zoning, etc. That is then reviewed after a period of five years. Again, through monitoring, if w

Fisheries committee  You're strictly referring to enforcement and not the monitoring piece, correct?

Fisheries committee  It's strictly enforcement. Okay. This actually was the subject of a lot of discussion at the international marine protected area conference in September: how are countries with few resources going to monitor MPAs and intrusions of fishing vessels and all sorts of things into MPAs

Fisheries committee  I think the boundaries will enclose the area that we want to protect and the species and the ecosystems that we want to protect, but , in my view, right now the selection criteria do not really ensure the long-term sustainability of these marine protected areas. We need monitorin

Fisheries committee  I think that probably the most important point to make about taking the precautionary approach to things is that even if we don't know anything at a higher level, we understand the importance of an ecosystem or an area for its representativeness of a region or for the fact that i

Fisheries committee  I would probably defer to DFO for questions on that, because it really comes out of the public consultation process, and I think that can vary from one area and one region to the next. It's important to be inclusive, but I can't really comment on how much weight is actually given

Fisheries committee  My definition of “offshore” is “beyond the edge of the continental shelf”, and that means waters deeper than 200 metres.

Fisheries committee  Yes, there are some very deep fjords and some deep holes much closer to shore. In many ways, the offshore comment also refers to distance from exploiters of resources and distance from sources of pollution and other human disturbance. Putting this roughly at the edge of the con

Fisheries committee  There again, we're mixing monitoring and enforcement, but in many ways it's inevitable. We have to think about this. If we're going to allow limited take of either fish or shellfish within marine protected areas, then I think we have to be prepared to have a proportional level of

Fisheries committee  This is a point that I tried to make earlier. We would all like to have more money for everything, but I think a lot can be done by using existing resources and encouraging partnerships, initially on the scientific side between DFO and the academic researchers, and also by bringi

Fisheries committee  The most significant gaps are in understanding year-to-year variability in the abundance of different species: how many there are this year, and how many there are the following year, and how that relates to changing weather or changing climate. What is the normal range of change

Fisheries committee  Looking ahead to 2020, I would suggest that a precautionary approach is probably a good way to proceed, but there again, this brings in the whole monitoring thing as something that should be part of the whole process of establishing an MPA. We should have a plan for the developme