Thank you for that question. It's a critical question and it's certainly been of real interest to me over the years, coming from a commercial fishing background. This is recognized around the world. The first thing every fishery needs is accurate reflection of its catch reporting and compliance with that and being able to provide that information to the management body.
What's even more critical in Canada is that Canada uses discards, or releasing fish, as one of its primary conservation tools, so we have to also understand not only the retained catch but the releases and what happens to those released fish after they are released, because a proportion of them—and it can be a large proportion—don't survive to recruit into the population. Having that accurate information is critical.
There is a national policy for implementing it for all fisheries. None of the salmon fisheries, no salmon fishery, whether it be first nations, recreational or commercial, has gone through it. There are some other notable fisheries that have, and they are world recognized, partly because of it. That includes the groundfish fishery and some others in British Columbia and elsewhere in Canada.
In the absence of good monitoring and good basic information flowing into it, you cannot effectively manage a population without it, and to fail to do it is really a blot on DFO.