My experiences with stock assessment, counting salmon and harvests and determining harvest rates, are principally the work I've done with DFO. The challenge is that there are a heck of a lot of salmon streams and inadequate funding to monitor them. That has varied over the administrations with regard to the amount of funding DFO has received.
There are cases where they've been explicitly directed to collect better data, such as in the interior Fraser coho crisis. Twenty years later, when we go to look at the new data, we realize that the better stock assessment was not done. I'm not close enough to the department to know how much of that has to do with funding and how much has to do with problems within the department. I suspect some mix is possible.
I think a common theme is sort of that promises are made to do better science and, in looking at that in the fullness of time, you see that often that doesn't work out.