As I mentioned, Pacific herring has one of the very best datasets, going back decades on this coast. It's also recently been through a management strategy evaluation, which allows the science people at DFO to evaluate the effect of different harvest-control rules. The harvest-control rule that we've long had in place, going back some 30 years, of essentially a 20% harvest rate, has been shown through modelling to be not significantly different in terms of the biological outcomes from the 10%, say, that the minister chose.
The effect of that decision was to take $15 million or $20 million out of the fishery, without in our view putting any more fish for salmon, especially as the predator-prey relationship between salmon and herring is really quite complicated because on the whole salmon don't eat adult herring. Sometimes they do. However, herring do eat juvenile salmon, so we can actually see, going back over time, that as herring populations in the Strait of Georgia have increased, Chinook salmon populations have gone down. It's much more complicated than the minister suggested.
For me, the worrying thing is that the science, with all these years of hard work and peer reviews, was ignored. I think that sends the wrong message to fish harvesters, because basically we're prepared on this coast to live and die by the science. If the science says we can fish, we should. If it says we can't, we won't.