There are several aspects to the decision of the minister to reopen a commercial fishery in the northern cod stock with an increased quota and new entrants. I'm going to deal only with the scientific information on the stock and advance my opinion that the decision does not provide for precautionary management in sustainable fisheries and opposes the spirit, if not the letter, of the stock provisions of the Fisheries Act.
To go back a bit, the door was reopened for a commercial fishery in the fall of 2023, when DFO science conducted a new analysis of the productivity of the stock. This resulted in a revised stock recruitment relationship and a lowering of the critical limit reference point—the LRP, as I'll refer to it. They based this on age-0 recruitment, which is very unusual in fisheries science and hasn't really been tested. This LRP, then, is the dividing line between a stock being in critical condition, with its ability to sustain itself seriously impaired, and a cautious zone, where the stock is still below or, in the case of the northern cod, well below its historical abundance and productivity. It is also below any target biomass or upper limit where productivity is not considered to be impaired. That's still undefined by science for the northern cod.
It's very important to emphasize that, despite being moved into the cautious zone, the stock itself did not grow into the cautious zone. At least some of the press I read inferred this, but it's simply that the bar to jump over the line into the cautious zone was lowered.
It's also important to emphasize that the lowering of the LRP was substantial. It was considered that the stock needed at least a million tonnes of spawning biomass to remain productive, as it has historically. As recently as 2023, the LRP was considered by DFO's and other scientific analyses, including some done by me and my colleagues, to exceed 800,000 tonnes. The new LRP reduces it to somewhat above 300,000 tonnes.
This rewrites science history, which is a very important aspect. The lowering of the LRP suggests that the stock has been in the cautious zone since 2016, with production—meaning reproductive success recruitment—not seriously impaired. The evidence to date, however, indicates that recruitment has been well below historical averages for all of the seven or eight years since then. This provides very little evidence that the LRP is justified.
It's reasonable to think that if productivity were not seriously impaired, as it's supposed to be now, at least one or two years of historically average recruitment would have occurred in the past seven or eight years. However, it has not. While I applaud DFO science for its investigation and research, I will remain skeptical about this new lowered and unverified LRP until there's evidence that the stock can be as productive for fisheries, not age-0s, with such a low spawning biomass. I think it is too soon to use it to determine management. This is my opinion.
What about the stock itself? Since 2016, when, according to the LRP, the stock was out of the critical zone, the impacts of a lack of strong recruitment, fishing removals and unspecified natural mortality—which Dr. Carruthers referred to—have all led the stock to have zero net productivity, with a negative or flatlined biomass in some years, and with no improvement in sight according to the latest stock assessment. My assumption when approaching this is that a management objective is stock growth. It's axiomatic that stock growth requires positive net productivity. As it stands, the current stock assessment indicates that the stock is in a very weak position for growth, even with no fishing. Projections suggest further decline.
It seems clear that the assumed management objective has not been met on stock growth. To be fair, stock growth is dependent on several factors in the environment that are now not favourable, especially the lack of capelin, the main food of the northern cod. Management does control fishing removals, though, and up until this year and this recent decision it has done an admirable job of keeping those removals low enough so as not to result in stock decline, even when environmental conditions were poor.
Maybe that's the best we can do right now, but we're not doing our best. The current decision to increase the quota considerably, by nearly 50%, and to impose two new entrants in the offshore increases the likelihood of stock decline, even to the extent of collapsing the spawning biomass back below the new LRP. From the DFO latest assessment, the probability of doing this is worryingly high, at 42% with no fishery and 52% with a doubled harvest. According to the fish stocks provisions in the Fisheries Act—