Fisheries committee  I'll say that certainly the establishment of MPAs is largely based on science. As science has improved over the years, it's certainly more predominant now than ever. As we go out and have consultations, whether it's with fishers or academia, it always comes back to science. You c

Fisheries committee  I think that when we use the term MPA, we're using the broad marine conservation targets as well—which, as Mr. Gilchrist described, are actually other enforcement measures—and those fall under the Fisheries Act, so those are the ones we have in place. I think the reference there

Fisheries committee  I can start on it. Monitoring and enforcement obviously are very important parts of any management measures when you're talking about prohibition, closed areas, and that type of thing. A lot of the areas we're talking about now for MPAs are large areas that are offshore and so o

Fisheries committee  I guess our most recent experience is of the need to consult as broadly as possible; and as to the people we are consulting with, it's very important to have the right people there. For example, when we're talking about closed areas, if you start off, quite often you'll get rep

Fisheries committee  I would also throw in that there are proposed amendments, of course, to the Oceans Act that talk about things like freezing the footprint, and that would speed up the process so that you would be able to offer protections before the actual MPA was established.

Fisheries committee  I think how that when you freeze the footprint, any activities that are currently occurring are allowed as those discussions are ongoing. I think that might help in that regard.

Fisheries committee  I can speak to what happened in Newfoundland and Labrador because that's obviously the region I'm familiar with. I think your question is around the co-operation between the oceans management branch and the resource management branch. Is that correct?

Fisheries committee  The last consultations we had were around the marine conservation targets. Many of those were just announced in December. As we were going out doing consultations on those, we actually did them in conjunction with each other. When we were doing consultations, there were represent

Fisheries committee  Do you mean on individual MPAs?

Fisheries committee  We look at a couple of things. They're based on ecologically sensitive areas, so we worked with the science. Science identifies where the sensitive areas are, and we look at those and at what needs to be protected. Once we look at that, the consultation begins with industry and o

Fisheries committee  The management measures that you describe other than MPAs can be things such as seasons or quotas, that type of thing. With MPAs, the conservation objective can be about a specific species. That does happen. However, MPAs can be very broad as well and take in biodiversity, multis

Fisheries committee  I could add a bit of perspective. Over the years we've learned, and science is teaching us, that all these measures that we put in place, whether they're MPAs or management measures, and so on, are not necessarily restricted to individual boundaries. In other words, it's a more

Fisheries committee  That's correct.

Fisheries committee  The changes that have been observed are mainly that the catch per unit effort, or how hard it is to catch a lobster, has improved. This means better and more stable catch rights, which was the objective in the first place because, as you recall, it was because of a decline—that's

Fisheries committee  Yes, on the issue of whether size matters, I think it goes back to what the conservation objective is. As we're discussing here today, we're looking at the Eastport MPA, and the objective there was pretty clear. It was to establish and maintain a viable lobster fishery in the Eas