Science and Research committee  Absolutely. Yes, and we'd love to talk more about that.

Science and Research committee  We measure everything from temperature to video data of the deep sea. The data are openly available for the most part except for indigenous communities who want to protect their own data. Most of it is open data following the federal government's policy. It's used by educators, s

Science and Research committee  We have been slow at translating everything in both official languages. For example, we have had this as a priority. You can say that $25 million a year is quite a large sum. To give you context, we are equivalent to a U.S. observatory, and their funding is about one third greate

Science and Research committee  I think those organizations do have citizen science programs. At Ocean Networks Canada, we're a non-profit. We don't consider ourselves a conservation organization. We operate infrastructure for scientific purposes and we are basically agnostic on issues but of course keenly int

Science and Research committee  That's a great question. With each of the communities we work with, we have an agreement. In some cases the communities want to be the owners. We have an incredibly rich data system that follows strict principles, fair care OCAP principles, to ensure that, for example, if the in

Science and Research committee  That's a wonderful question. I would say that would be a wonderful thing to do. From our experience working with indigenous communities, there's a very big discrepancy among those communities. For example, some have the capacity to invest in scientific studies to identify their p

Science and Research committee  Thank you for that question. Because I work on the ocean and because we're all concerned about climate change—climate change will be impacting our coasts first—I do think that expanding the citizen science along the coast will be beneficial to the country for gathering situation

Science and Research committee  Are you asking if Ocean Networks Canada is a conservation organization? Can you clarify the question?

Science and Research committee  The program that we have is called community fishers. We provide a standard oceanographic instrument to a community. We provide training. Then that community, usually with leaders and youth together, set out to capture data, typically on a weekly basis, using their own boats, or

Science and Research committee  I'll answer your second question first. Yes, that's our intention—to expand citizen science programs, particularly the community fishers program, for the purpose of growing the indigenous coastal communities to be truly the stewards of our coastline. That is through the marine pr

Science and Research committee  We do have to have some training, of course, but the community fishers.... Actually, one reason we started community fishers was the Pacific Salmon Foundation's hallmark approach to citizen science. It's really putting an instrument in the hands of these communities. They gather

Science and Research committee  The way that Ocean Networks Canada is working is to really engage with indigenous communities. In fact, we have a partnership with the Maritimes tribal council in Nova Scotia. There's a keen interest in indigenous communities to be those coastal stewards. That's our primary focus

Science and Research committee  Every community is different. That's what we've found. It's really about ensuring that we have rich dialogue with each of the communities. Each community has different priorities. For example, some communities here on the west coast of British Columbia are keenly interested in u

Science and Research committee  No, we need many more, of course. As I mentioned, you need to ensure that the data collected are of a high scientific value, as Jason just talked about. At Ocean Networks Canada, we have built a back end on the data side to be robust enough to actually expand tremendously. We a

Science and Research committee  Thank you very much for inviting me. I'm the president and CEO of Ocean Networks Canada, and I'll describe it as ONC throughout. We operate one of Canada's largest research facilities funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Government of Canada. We operate these