Hon. Joyce Murray, P.C., M.P., Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard: Thank you for that question, senator. First, I want to assure all senators that we make the decisions at Fisheries and Oceans Canada, or DFO, based on the best available science. In the case of the turbot stock, there was a temporary gap in the science due to the fact that the ship that had been doing the assessments, which was provided by Greenland because we have a shared stock, was temporarily not in service.

For that year, we were still able to utilize the data from the time series of assessments over the past 10 years as well as fish harvester data to have an assessment, albeit the trawling had not been done that year. We were slightly more precautionary because of the absence of the trawling data, but this was a temporary issue and Greenland’s vessel that was out of commission has now been replaced.

We made a one-year decision on the tack rather than the normal two-year decision because we knew that we would be able to fill that data gap when Greenland provided the vessel, again, a year later. I’m confident in our ability to manage the stock, and I will continue to make sure that conservation underpins everything we do.