Thank you, Mr. Arnold.
Before joining the institute, I spent five years working for a large international conservation organization focusing on fisheries issues. The global conversation around ecosystem management of fisheries and whatever that means is certainly an ongoing one. However, something that we see very clearly is the need to consider predation within DFO's population models.
We're seeing right now, in the northwest Atlantic, the beginnings of a collapse of primary production. We're seeing the collapse of primary production. Pairing that with significant increases in natural mortality, which we're seeing across a number of species, particularly groundfish, if there's not enough energy going into the system and there's too much of the system going into seals, then it is fairly straightforward to see that there will be an impact across the system.
It's not that we need to put seal predation on a pedestal above everything else in the model, but we need to be honest with ourselves. We need to be honest in the management of our fisheries, not only in commercial fisheries but also in the management of at-risk species, that these increases in natural mortality that have occurred across a number of populations through the 1990s and early 2000s, which are largely unexplained right now, do have a fairly straightforward explanation. We need to be very cognizant of additive mortality above that natural mortality if that natural mortality is itself increasing.