Thank you for the question.
Certainly the question of what COSEWIC does and the consequences of COSEWIC's assessments are of course not part of the COSEWIC decision-making process. COSEWIC is charged, under the act, with making species assessments on the basis of the best available scientific evidence that pertains to the status of those species.
The consequences from a social, economic, political, or financial perspective are not, under the act, meant to be part of the COSEWIC assessment decision-making framework. So if COSEWIC assessed abalone, it would be in a way that uses the same information and framework it would use to assess any other species, following criteria used by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the IUCN.
Of course the assessment COSEWIC assigns to a species depends on the current status of that species relative to a series of criteria. Under a recovery strategy, if that recovery strategy is working, and a species has moved from an endangered or threatened level to a level at which it has met its target under the recovery strategy, then of course it would be down-listed by COSEWIC.
Almost irrespective of what COSEWIC does, government actually has a lot of tools available to it, both at the provincial and federal levels. With respect to abalone, I seem to recall discussions with some government officials regarding permits and permitting and the fact that the real stumbling block--and you might wish to look into this further--has to do with the permitting process at both the provincial and federal levels.
I can't speak in more detail about that now, simply because it's been a couple of years since I was fully familiar with it.