Fisheries committee  There's no quick response. You can take them under UNFA. There could be a dispute under NAFO in the new convention and that could lead to UNFA, but you can't just send a gunboat out to do something on very quick actions. Certainly that has happened in the past, as we are aware, but it wasn't quick; it involved a lot of diplomacy.

Fisheries committee  That's correct.

Fisheries committee  No, that is not it; it is another document. It is available on the NAFO Website. This document looks like it. It is something that we negotiated two years back.

Fisheries committee  Yes. It costs approximately $30 million. That represents the expenditures of the Government of Canada in order to be certain that we are in compliance with the regulations and that we can project and establish the catch.

Fisheries committee  The “certain circumstances” are clear. They include misreporting of a catch, and fishing directly for species subject to moratoriums. Those are two clear ones. There are also provisions for those doing “directed fishing for stocks or species after the date on which the contracted party for the inspected vessel has notified the executive secretary....”

Fisheries committee  Generally they'd have an idea of the captain. Obviously these vessels have been in the NAFO regulatory area for years, so they know the captain. I'm not sure they'd know all the crew members. Because fishery officers boarding a vessel on the high seas are boarding under the flag of NAFO and under the authority of NAFO, they have to be accredited by NAFO.

Fisheries committee  We'll have people there. We've been running those conferences in conjunction with others, and we have participated from the start. Quite frankly, though, that's not quite related to what's going on in that. It's more to share information on how countries are running their own observer programs.

Fisheries committee  They're a coastal state. So are France and Greenland. That applies to all.

Fisheries committee  I think it's fair. There's been some concern raised about the possibility of NAFO making decisions relevant to completely Canadian stocks like those in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. I don't think that's something people need to be concerned about. Clearly, when we're dealing with something like Greenland halibut, we've agreed to follow the NAFO decisions relevant to the TAC and our share of the Greenland halibut.

Fisheries committee  That's correct.

Fisheries committee  That's correct.

Fisheries committee  That's correct. I think we have two now. The Cowley came in with a crew, and then the Cyngnus was able to make that inspection.

Fisheries committee  No. The other one came from another contracting party, once while the Faroese were there. I've forgotten who.... At one point last summer we had five patrol vessels, and I can't remember if it was Russian or.... One was Russian, we believe--one Russian, one EU, and three Canadian.

Fisheries committee  We are not spending that amount on aerial surveillance. That's more or less what it costs us for the whole package. The air surveillance would not be a huge part of that. It's significant, but it's not that amount. The EU does not have air surveillance because they don't have any place to base an airplane.

Fisheries committee  That's right. Now, every vessel has VMS. We know where they all are based on VMS. The air surveillance is used to verify the VMS, to make sure nobody's turned it off or found a way to falsify it. More importantly, the air surveillance is to make sure we know what's going on there for security and for other reasons, and on the fishing side to make sure nobody shows up unannounced in the NAFO regulatory area and starts fishing without our knowledge of it.