To backtrack slightly, again one of the issues that the panel was asked to address was to assess the degree to which Canada is fulfilling, or has been fulfilling, its national and international commitments to conserve marine biodiversity. The panel observed that other countries appeared to be making progress in areas where Canada appears not to have been making progress, and not just recently, but maybe for at least the last two decades. So the panel concluded that there must be something of an institutional nature that perhaps might be reducing the rate of policy implementation. One of those might be the discretion enjoyed by the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans insofar as the Fisheries Act is not a prescriptive piece of legislation but allows for wide discretion.
For comparative purposes, in the United States they have an act called the Magnuson–Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which is highly prescriptive, defines what overfishing is, defines what the Secretary of Commerce must do if a fishery is deemed overfished, and so on. Basically if overfishing is taking place, then in essence the secretary's hands are tied to some degree insofar as a rebuilding plan must take place.
But we don't currently have those stipulations in Canada. It's probably an impediment for the minister as well. It might well be deemed that the ministers might in fact prefer to have that discretion reduced to some degree, but that was viewed as an issue.