Thank you very much, sir.

I am a senior scientist at the Canadian Whale Institute and the Campobello whale rescue team that responds to entangled whales in the Canadian Maritimes and Quebec. I'm also a scientist emeritus at the New England Aquarium in Boston, Massachusetts.

I started right whale research in 1985, and, my goodness, that's 37 years ago now. I've studied right whales in all of their habitat areas, from the calving ground in Florida to the fairly new habitat in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. We use all of the data that we have collected on right whales over the years in all of these different habitats.

I was the lead author on the first recovery strategy for Fisheries and Oceans Canada. I led a working group in the early 2000s to relocate the Bay of Fundy shipping lanes and an area in the Roseway Basin area to deal with vessel strikes in the two critical habitat areas for right whales in Canadian waters. Our conservation efforts at that time were focused on vessel strikes, because that was the leading cause of mortality in the 1990s and early 2000s.

We started studying right whales in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 2013 and 2014, partially because we were seeing fewer and fewer animals in the Bay of Fundy. Now, of course, since the unusual mortality event in 2017, most of my work is focused in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, doing field research, responding to entangled whales and using those data to work with the various advisory groups led by Transport Canada and Fisheries and Oceans Canada to respond to the right whale emergency that came up in the gulf.

I would say that Canada has done an incredible job, with a very fast response, on what happened in the gulf in 2017, and again in 2018, with the high number of mortalities from human-related activities, vessel strikes and gear entanglements. After working in this for most of my adult life, and also spending part of that time in the United States, I can tell you that this work was started down in the U.S. in about 1996. In the five ensuing years since 2017, we have not only met similar protection measures for right whales in Canadian waters, but we have exceeded what's being done by our partners in the states to the south.

There is still work to be done—we haven't solved the problem yet—and like many conservation actions, it is not “one and done”. This is something we will have to keep doing in an iterative way for years to come, if we're going to recover the North Atlantic right whale and have coexistence between fisheries and the shipping industry in Canadian waters.

Thanks very much. I look forward to your questions.

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