If you were to look at international best practices, you'd see, I think, that we probably don't. I'm inclined to think we don't. I think that Iceland and Norway probably have a better process. However, when it comes to this—you mentioned the limit reference point, as to what extent that was shaped out of a political process or a scientific one—again, I come back to the question of transparency, because there was a question about whether this new DFO fisheries model has been verified and validated. I've asked scientists and other people to tell me if this went through the proper process.
What I was told was that DFO science invited people, and specific people were asked to come. With some of them, they shared the data; in other cases they didn't. Most of the people attending the forum were by invitation. It wasn't open. Was this an open process that led from the old LRP to the new one? I would think it's not. It was not really as transparent as it should have been, because I think there's such a quantum change.
When I was deputy minister of fisheries, essentially, we needed to have one million tonnes of spawning biomass in the water before we could have a productive fishery. Now we're down somewhere between 300,000 tonnes and 400,000 tonnes. On the quantum change, the reduction in the LRP, the goalpost, changed to a large extent here, much more than the stock. Some can argue that the stock has increased, and some of the previous witnesses spoke about that—that the 2024 surveys are very encouraging. However, one swallow doesn't make a spring. It takes more than one survey before you can reach definitive conclusions about the health of a stock.
My fear is that the limit reference point was changed without proper consultation, without the kind of open civic engagement that's needed to have credibility for science. My sense is that, when you come back to the Canadian question of where Canada stands, I'm not so sure.