Thank you, Mr. Chair. For the Bluenose-East the recommendations from the board was 1,800 animals, and we’ve allocated those tags, authorization cards to the Aboriginal governments. The co-management partners informed that they wanted the 80/20 bull-cow ratio to be enforced. Through that process with the authorizations, today they’ve reached the cow limit. The tags that are being utilized by the communities are now bull-only authorizations.
Regarding the Bathurst, of course, the herd is protected with the core mobile zone. The Member did identify 12 collars. We had approval in the past to collar 20 animals and we brought the number up, of course, to that last year. As we know, the herd continues to decline. Cow mortality, of course, we’ve lost a number of collars. However, I just wanted to take the opportunity to explain how we came up with this core management zone. It was because of the way the Bathurst herd had been behaving this year. They came off the calving ground as a core group. They’ve basically remained that way. That’s something unique that we haven’t seen before, and even on the winter range they haven’t dispersed like they’ve done in the past. So we’ve had that ability to use that collared information to identify this core mobile conservation zone.
However, regarding the limited number of collars, we do have approval to up that number to 50 collars and we are undertaking that exercise and bringing those numbers up to that level in the month of March. Thank you, Mr. Chair.