That question is really important.
For a number of years we've had difficulty, particularly in the Atlantic regions, with surveys and vessels. This is well known to people. I was involved in this for 30-plus years. That goes a long way back, but it seems recently it's gotten more extreme. Some of the more important species that we have, commercially, depend on the surveys, and the surveys just aren't getting done.
It's been blamed on vessels that are not serviceable. We have new vessels coming in that weren't calibrated with the old vessels, and you can ask questions about why that wasn't done more efficiently and so on and so forth, but the bottom line, as was pointed out, is that the data—which is all-important in answering any of these questions that we have—for some of the key species, like capelin and now cod, just isn't there. What science does, when data isn't there, is create a model, which is just an abstraction. Unfortunately, models can prove just about anything, and that's sometimes where it goes astray.
If I can answer a previous question, I feel I have to put in some lines of defence for science. Certainly, in the questions of the interactions between pinnipeds and fish, it isn't universally accepted among working scientists that there's no effect. That's simply not the case.
There are very good examples within DFO, for example, of scientists who have published things that are definitely on the side of, “Yes, there's an influence. We may not be able to quantify it, because of the lack of data that we've referred to, but there's almost certainly an influence.” To argue otherwise is ecological nonsense. That's true on the east coast and the west coast.
When it comes right down to it, we need better information on these things. There's no doubt about that. It seems to me, particularly in the last few years, that the situation—far from getting better, which we hoped it would—has been getting much worse.