As I said, the vast majority of decisions that are taken by NAFO are taken on the basis of a consensus. There is truly an effort to come together in a cooperative spirit to secure the sustainable use and the conservation of the resources. The types of practices that occurred in the past, that you allude to in terms of the European Union and of others, of objecting and setting quotas and overfishing those quotas, is not currently the practice that we're seeing from these parties.
There are a lot of decisions that are being taken that don't need to be put to a vote. For example, when we had discussion about the possible reopening of the 3M cod fishery on the Flemish Cap, Canada proposed that we have more stringent bycatch measures to ensure that we carefully manage the reopening of that fishery to secure its sustainability and continued rebuilding. All parties, including the European Union, agreed that we would continue with a 5% bycatch provision for 3M cod in other directed fisheries that would occur on the Flemish Cap catch, which is the level of bycatch that was permitted during the moratorium, where open fisheries would have permitted a bycatch at 10%. So this was very much a commitment on all parties to an ethic and an objective conservation in sustainable use.
These bycatches will be included against quotas of those parties that have quotas for 3M cod. So it's an example of the way forward where we would be expecting, as opposed to the past where objections were the recurring approach, that there would be an exception to an objection. There is going to be the requirement that a party would have to give cause and explanation as to why they're objecting. There is an openness and transparency in the process of NAFO. The world has changed and we have environmental NGOs at the table, observing all of the deliberations of NAFO. We have a great interest not only in terms of the public and the countries of NAFO parties, but also in terms of their industry to ensure that collectively we manage the fishery differently to give them the certainty and predictability that the fisheries will be there in a sustainable long-term way.
I do believe the philosophy and ethics have changed radically. The marketplace has changed as well, and insists on ensuring that people can't be out there blatantly overfishing, expecting to be able to sell into a marketplace any longer.