Thank you for your question.
The decision to move cod from the critical zone to the cautious zone was a result of a framework process held by DFO in October of 2023. It was a science advisory process and peer-reviewed. There was a lot of discussion around the information that was there. Of course, the assessment model is a wonderful model that makes use of all kinds of data from different sources.
There are still questions that remain, however, on the extent to which this model is really capturing cod population dynamics. I mentioned a little bit about how it partitions mortality between natural mortality—cod dying from natural causes, from disease and parasites and so on—and fishing mortality. There's been some question about how well the model is tackling this key issue. It's really important, because while the survey can give us a good idea of how well cod are surviving from one year to the next, we have to estimate the relative impact of these two factors, fishing versus natural mortality, from the model using the data and some key assumptions around the data.
That right now involves ideas about catch bounds, the extent to which the reported landings may in fact represent the true landings and how that's varied over time. There are also some key assumptions in there about tagging information and I guess the likelihood of harvesters to report those details back to DFO.
Yes, I think there are questions that require further examination. Hopefully, that will happen over the months and years to come. The decision to change the reference point did stem from a science advisory meeting.