Fisheries committee  I suppose the first thing to do would be to look at what has been done elsewhere—in other words, as I indicated in my opening remarks, what I would call best practices internationally. We have scientists in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States who have processes to establish these limit and target reference points based on science alone.

Fisheries committee  I've just heard them, but they sound familiar.

Fisheries committee  I think, to be fair, after a number of years of closure, there were a lot of reports in different places, notably in Trinity Bay, and the union was bringing these to the fore, to the government's attention, making the point that from its perspective the health of the stock was better than what DFO science was indicating.

Fisheries committee  Scientists don't like to be pinned down on these types of matters.

Fisheries committee  That said, you asked a question and you should get an answer. If the conditions that exist today and the productivity of northern cod today persist into the foreseeable future, given that a catch of 200,000 tonnes was clearly sustainable from roughly the 1830s to the 1960s, I would say it is not out of the question to identify 200,000 tonnes as a target quota, as something we would like to achieve.

Fisheries committee  I think it depends on the quality of fish.

Fisheries committee  In some places it's unchanged from what it was in the 1990s, but in other cases it's considerably more expensive.

Fisheries committee  The best available scientific information would be consistent with that hypothesis.

Fisheries committee  I could offer you my perspective on it, since you've asked me for my opinion. Where I buy my fish and where I buy my cod, you can pay a pretty penny for cod and for high quality fish from Iceland and Norway. It's more expensive than the shrimp. We come back to this issue of quality and the quality of the product.

Fisheries committee  Balance can be a tough word sometimes. Balance means different things to different people in different contexts. I would say there are perhaps two ways to look at this. One is, after the massive reduction in cod when we were left with a relatively small amount of cod compared to what was there certainly in the early 1960s, as I said earlier, they become more vulnerable and more susceptible to natural changes in the environment.

Fisheries committee  It's difficult to know sometimes how much effort one should expend in gaining more information relative to how much more information it's going to provide. DFO has been undertaking broadscale groundfish research surveys throughout the northern cod region since 1983. They were designed for cod.

Fisheries committee  It wasn't the first recorded catch. We don't what the catch was, but it was clearly the first unambiguous report of vessels fishing in Newfoundland waters.

Fisheries committee  The largest cod stock in the world. It's primarily fished off the north coast of Norway in the Barents Sea.

Fisheries committee  Northern cod refers only to the cod found in management units 2J, 3K, and 3L, which is from Hamilton Bank in southern Labrador to the northern half of the Grand Banks. That's the only northern cod.

Fisheries committee  Thank you. Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, thank you for the invitation to speak before you as part of your study on northern cod. My personal experience with northern cod began as a child in the early sixties when I would walk with my father and my grandmother to Mr. George Temple's stage at the bottom of Bull Arm, Sunnyside, Trinity Bay.