QUESTION PERIOD — Ministry of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard
Biomass Data Collection
March 7, 2023
I want to go back to the science, minister. Again, before my brother-in-law was on the Alfred Needler, he was the fishing captain on the Gadus Atlantica, which did all the research on the decline of the North Atlantic cod. He knows very well the importance of data collection when making decisions.
It’s well known that DFO has not conducted many stock assessments in Atlantic Canada for many years. For example, in November, CBC reported that your department missed most of last year’s spring survey off Newfoundland, with Cape Breton and eastern Nova Scotia getting no coverage at all in the 2022 summer survey.
How can you competently manage the Atlantic Canadian fisheries when you don’t have any current data on the biomass in order to justify your decisions?
Thank you for that question. I would contest, really, the characterization that we don’t have any data. The ministry is very committed to working from the best available science. There are sometimes reversals that make it difficult to do everything that we would like to do, but we have a very committed set of ministry officials who are working with the harvest community in most cases to develop robust data that is complemented, of course, by the trawl surveys. There are other sources of data that they feed into the algorithms as well, and we will always do our very best to have good-quality data that is done in a way that we can count on.
