Hon. Dennis Glen Patterson: Minister, you said that there was a vessel not available from Greenland that resulted in the absence of data on the turbot stock. As I said, the Nunavut fishing industry was willing to conduct those stock assessments, and those offers were rejected by your department. This has resulted in a $15-million estimated loss per year for our fledgling and developing fishery in Nunavut. Wouldn’t it only be fair that the Nunavut fishing industry be considered for compensation by your department for this loss?

Hon. Joyce Murray, P.C., M.P., Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard: Thanks for that question. As I mentioned, the reduction in tack was a temporary one, and it had to do with the lack of availability of our partner nation Greenland’s ship, which has now been resolved.

The challenge with introducing assessments that are not part of a time series is that the validity of that data is not as strong as data that is done with the same ship, with the same methods and patterns of doing the fishing to make the assessment.

As senators are probably aware, when a new vessel is introduced, it will do the assessment trawling side by side for a great deal of time with the outgoing vessel, the retiring vessel, just to make sure that the equipment is set up in a way to achieve the same results, or else what happens is that the time series doesn’t have the integrity that it needs to have to be able to make allocation decisions and be confident that the science is robust. So patching in something for a year or two is not a solution that is as robust in terms of the scientific validity as continuing with a vessel configuration that has already been used to develop that data series.