I really appreciate that question.
I think it was MP Arnold who was saying he wanted to stay optimistic. I, too, try to remain optimistic, but you also need to be realistic. My opinion has continued to change as the evidence has continued to change and as the runs have continued to decline. Ten years ago, I probably would have given you a different answer on where I think things are at. I'm gravely concerned.
I'll just start off by mentioning some of the parallels that I see in broad strokes between northern cod and salmon.
At the time, there were questions about whether the collapse of cod was a climate story or an overfishing story. There were different views of the world. And, of course, the answer to that is it was the interaction between the two. The fishery vastly overharvested northern cod by number, but also the diversity of those cod was greatly reduced, and we've been talking about that. To be clear, for the chinook story, in particular, as the numbers have gone down, so too have the size and numbers of eggs and the depth to which females can dig nests, all these things that are tied to things we think are influencers of productivity and survival.
A lot of that diversity had been lost, and then in the context of a changing climate—Newfoundland is always cold, and it got really cold in the early 1990s—the cod stock then did not have the built-in resiliency and diversity to withstand that shifting environment, and it led to a collapse.
I think there is something to that in terms of the parallelism here. We do have a changing climate, and it's undeniable. It's a fact. We have lost the numbers and we have lost the quality, the size. That is a huge component of concern.
What can we do about that? This came up in a bit of the previous question about natural selection and so forth. Some of the real challenges, as we know, are that the age and size at which salmon mature is in large part controlled by genetics. There are environmental controls on that, but there's also a genetic control. For a chinook salmon to be really big requires them to spend a lot of time in the ocean, and there is some genetic control over when fish decide to mature. They're not cognitively thinking it through, but they are genetically programmed as to when, given size and age, they will transition to become mature.
And partly because of, yes, absolutely—