Fisheries committee  It's at Simon Fraser University.

Fisheries committee  Thank you. I just want to give you a little bit of additional background on myself. I'm also the co-founder and chief technical officer for Landmark Fisheries Research, which is a small consulting firm. We do research that supports the fisheries community, including fishing asso

Fisheries committee  I agree mostly. The peer review process in scientific journals meets a certain standard, but you can get bad reviews. You can get reviews that are inaccurate, you can get reviewers who have misunderstood the material, and you can get reviewers who are too busy to do a good review

Fisheries committee  Generally we need to limit exploitation. A lot of fish stocks have been over-exploited. Some would call it sustainably over-exploited to the point where they're held at a really low level. At least on the west coast of Canada and to some degree on the east coast as well, there ar

Fisheries committee  There are more than 87 MPAs worldwide. These were 87 MPAs that were studied in the same ways using the same methodologies, and so on. There were measures of biomass, the number of species, species diversity, and different things like that. Some of these things you expect. If you

Fisheries committee  I think so. One of the things we're trying to create research to support on the west coast is using things like technology to help the fishing industry avoid places that really do need protection—corals and sponges in particular.

Fisheries committee  Is it reckless? I don't know. A colleague of mine has tried to track down where the 20% came from. Maybe Stephen knows better, but it's not based on any theoretical measure. It's a fairly arbitrary number. I don't really know. I think if it were possible to map where corals and

Fisheries committee  With every stock assessment I've been involved in, the main recommendation is to reduce fish mortality. Most of the stocks I've been involved with in the sustainable fisheries framework have been very close to the cautious zone, and some of them actually below limit reference poi

Fisheries committee  The only way to sample fish is to pull them up to the surface, so you need a net, or you need hooks, traps, or whatever it is that fish will go into. We have an entire sablefish fishery on the west coast that's one of the most valuable in Canada. It's highly selective because onl

Fisheries committee  Species, sizes....

Fisheries committee  I have a couple. There's a general rule in fisheries stock assessment, population dynamics, and so on that you cannot know the optimal size of a stock until you overfish it. Letting a stock grow to its largest size tells you nothing about the optimal productivity of that stock.

Fisheries committee  I agree. It's always good to look at how other countries are doing things. I think you would also look at the structures that are in place to help them do what they're doing. Australia, for instance, has a fisheries management authority that's at arm's length from government. Tha

Fisheries committee  You're looking at me.

Fisheries committee  I don't know this area at all.

Fisheries committee  I think that if you were to do something like that, you would always want to consider an alternative of reducing the fishing mortality. As I've mentioned, we have a lot of stocks that are pretty heavily exploited, and a lot of times I don't see the benefit of a spacial closure ve