A Better Course for the Good Ship DFO

Barry Darby and Helen Forsey

(for The Navigator, August 2025)

The good ship DFO (home port Ottawa, Ontario) has a new captain at the helm. Joanne Thompson, MP for St. John’s East, has been named to take on the daunting task of guiding that unwieldy vessel through the perennially choppy waters of Canada’s Fisheries and Oceans.

Those waters are teeming with problems, both recent and of longstanding: the ongoing issues with Atlantic cod and Pacific salmon, the overcapitalization and economic inequities of industrialized fishing, the marginalization of small-scale community-based harvesting, the debates over forage fish, the questionable closures of mackerel and herring fisheries – the list goes on. Most recently, we see the spectacular disappearance of a few million tonnes of redfish in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where a major harvest should have begun five years ago when the huge stock peaked. Instead, the redfish exhausted their available food supply and depleted the area’s shrimp stock in a vain attempt to stave off mass starvation.

This litany of problems makes it clear that if she stays on her present course, the good ship DFO will continue sailing away from sustainability and prosperity.

However, those same persistent problems also present Skipper Thompson and her crew with an unprecedented opportunity to change course and navigate towards fishery success and ocean health. The key will be to focus on fishing, not catching.

Fishing and catching are not at all the same thing. As any harvester or angler will testify, too often you can fish and fish and still catch little or nothing. But if fish are plentiful and you use the right gear and timing, you can catch a lot, and do it without damaging the stock or the habitat. Fishery policy needs to make that distinction, and manage the fishing, not the catch.

DFO’s current course – its so-called “Precautionary Approach Framework” – narrows the problem down to a simplistic question of “How Much?” The assumption is that predicting Total Allowable Catches and using quotas will lead to sustainability. But our study of the science, and the ongoing history of miserable results, show that assumption to be just plain wrong.

What to do? Those at the helm of DFO could direct our fishery science and management towards controlling inputs rather than outputs – managing the fishing effort, the “Who, What, How, When and Where” of fishing, rather than the number of tonnes to be caught. This is the way Newfoundland’s lobster fishery has been managed for the past 98 years, and that fishery has continued to be both economically profitable and ecologically sustainable. With the right change of course, DFO could make that success happen for the rest of our fisheries as well.

Let’s explain what this alternative course would look like. Under Input-Based Management (IBM), the Department’s scientists and managers would focus on the “Who, What, How, When and Where” – the inputs to the fishery. For the “Who”, only certified harvesters, both skippers and crew, would have the exclusive right to fish commercially, and certification would be based on experience, training and registration as in the case of other professions and trades.

The “What” would involve a more ecosystem-based approach rather than dealing with each stock in an isolated silo. Assessments and harvest planning would look broadly at effects, taking full account of relationships between the target species and the rest of the ecological web. Focussing on “what” would also help resolve the tangly economic and environmental issues of “bycatch” by ensuring that all animals caught would be either utilized or released live. The “When” and “Where” would be addressed with a refined system of seasons and zones, responsive to harvester input, marine spatial planning and data collected in real time.

The “How” is the biggie, and the aspect least represented in DFO’s current quota-based system. Input-based management implements what science has identified as the most sustainable way to fish – selective harvesting, using gear that targets the smaller and middle-sized fish. The “positive inefficiencies” involved often make economic sense as well, and help ensure future harvests by allowing the largest, most reproductive fish, and the juveniles, to survive. This approach also reflects the principles of the “Honourable Harvest,” developed and practised sustainably over generations in traditional Indigenous cultures.

Under Input-Based Management, regulations would foster selective fishing by specifying the kind, size, and amount of fishing gear per certified harvester that could be used in each season and zone. For example, hook-and-line harvesters might be permitted to use 1200 baited hooks per person per day; for mid-water trawling, a given number of harvesters would use a certain size of trawl for a certain period of time. Other limits would include the length and depth of a net or line, soak times, mesh size, the number of traps and pots, etc.

On a severity index, the most sustainable gear types are handlines, longlines, pots and traps, all of which harvest selectively and enable people to make a decent livelihood. Midwater trawls (eg. for redfish) and gillnets can be moderately sustainable. However, bottom gillnets are problematic, since they wrongly target the larger fish, result in poorer quality, and create quantities of dead catch. Otter trawls are even worse, indiscriminately catching everything in their path, damaging the seabed and negatively impacting other fisheries such as crab. Bottom trawling is also over-capitalized, wasteful, high-emitting, inefficient and inequitable, and there is no real need for it in our fisheries.

And yet DFO’s current system fails to prioritize gear sustainability and other aspects of the “how,” because quota-based management is ultimately defined and constrained by “how much.” The underlying assumption is that regardless of how the fishing is done, you can calculate a finite permissible harvest tonnage for a given stock. But that is both unscientific and false. Managing a fishery on that basis fosters unsustainable fishing and results in the problems we see today.

Importantly, the huge statistical uncertainties inevitable in the setting of TACs and quotas often lead to serious mismanagement. This includes underfishing – unnecessary fishery closures and foregone harvests, causing annual losses of millions of dollars in harvester income. An example is 2J2KL cod, underharvested since 2017 when estimated stock numbers stabilized. This problem continues with DFO’s June decision to raise the 2025 TAC to 38,000 tonnes, which still falls well short of the 15-25% annual removal rate that has proven sustainable here and in other jurisdictions. Worse, the decision gives the green light to the dragger fleets to continue using their destructive bottom trawls. This all flies in the face of the principles of economic and ecological sustainability that form the foundation of Input-Based Management.

Despite the evidence and the contradictions, the course being followed by the good ship DFO remains the same. Up on the bridge, the navigational system seems permanently set in TAC and quota mode. There is much activity – back and forth among officers, study of charts and formulas, constant fiddling around with reference points and fleet allocations – all of it originating in and reinforcing the fundamentally flawed quota system at the base of the fishery’s perennial problems. Yet no one seems to notice that this course can never take us where we need to go.

Now, with the recent call for new ideas and new approaches to governing, Captain Thompson and her crew have a unique opportunity to change that course and steer a better way forward. The navigational aids of Input-Based Management are all there, ready for DFO to use, refine and adopt. Doing so would bring greatly increased economic and social benefits for coastal communities and for Canada as a whole, and the environmental benefits to the marine ecosystem would make our fisheries themselves sustainable.

Surely the goal of a healthy ocean with prosperous fisheries and sustainable coastal communities is worth a try.