The department always makes decisions using the best available science, which is the data of scientists, indigenous knowledge and also the experience of fish harvesters and catch-per-unit-effort. When we're not able to do a comparative trawl, which is the case in some of the fisheries right now as we re-establish the ships that are needed for the Canadian Coast Guard, we have data going back, in some cases, many decades, and so we use those data series as well and pull together the best available science.
On March 27th, 2023. See this statement in context.