Good evening, and thank you for this opportunity.
I'm Barry Darby. I'm a former harvester and retired college educator, formerly from the fishing community of Burin, Newfoundland.
For years my main focus has been doing research and advocacy on fishery management policy with my partner, Helen Forsey. Our policy initiative, Changing Course, recommends a shift to input-based management for our fisheries. This is directly relevant to the subject of your current study.
I want to address primarily the science and the analysis of our mackerel and herring stocks, and current management and rebuilding efforts.
In our view, three major factors severely limit the science, management and rebuilding plans for these stocks. First, there are huge, inherent uncertainties in attempts to measure stock biomass, to regulate removal and to predict their effects. Those interlocking uncertainties render largely invalid the calculations and resulting operational decisions based on them, such as spawning stock biomass, total allowable catch, limit reference points, rebuilding plans, etc.
The second factor is confusing fishing with catching. Catches in biomass are quantities that can be measured or estimated in kilotonnes. Fishing, on the other hand, is an activity involving many different variants and units of measurement. Trying to measure fishing or overfishing in kilotonnes is unscientific, gravely misleading and diverts our focus from managing the fishing itself.
The third factor is a false assumption that humans can rebuild fish stocks. Restoring ecosystem balance is done by nature, not by humans. We can only help with rebuilding and stop hindering it. To do so, we must understand the complexity of the ecosystem and our role as apex predators in it.
How can we help rebuild and maintain Atlantic mackerel and herring stocks and harvest them optimally? As we said in our Changing Course brief to this committee in 2022, DFO should stop focusing on how much fish we harvest, that is, the TACs and the quotas, and start focusing on how we go about harvesting. Instead of relying on output controls, trying to predict the unpredictable using highly uncertain data and error-prone computer modelling, DFO should shift to a system of input controls. Input-based management, IBM, regulates the inputs involved in the actual fishing activity. Those are: what fishing gear is allowed, how much of it can be used, by whom, when, and where.
To put into practice this slow-fishing IBM approach, DFO would mandate selective harvesting of mackerel and herring using low-impact gear like hook and line and gillnets. Specifications, that is, limits, would cover numbers, size and depth of gear and its use only by qualified commercial harvesters in designated areas and during specified times. This seemingly less efficient way of fishing would catch mainly mid-sized and middle-aged fish, leaving the younger recruits to grow and the largest spawners to continue replenishing the stocks.
It would also result in higher-quality product and would, in many cases, permit continuous fishing across a range of species year-round, which would benefit harvesters, processors and communities.
Under IBM, built-in feedback loops make the system largely self-adjusting, thus preventing overfishing. For example, if mackerel were scarce, the regulations for gear and other inputs would make overcatching impossible. If the fish were plentiful, harvests would be correspondingly large.
Proper monitoring and assessment would of course indicate success and problems in real time informing specific changes to be made for the following year. The proof of this is in the pudding. Newfoundland and Labrador's quotaless lobster fishery has been using input-based management with great success for almost a century, and many successful invertebrate fisheries in the U.S. also use it.
In closing, I'd like to say that perhaps we could suggest to our American neighbours that they apply input-based management to their mackerel and herring stocks as well.
Thank you for the opportunity, and I look forward to your questions and comments.