December 19, 2025
From the Desk to the Dock: What Canada Is Missing on Fisheries Recovery
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BY: Rebecca Schijns
Topics: Rebuild Ocean Abundance
By Rebecca Schijns, fishery scientist, Oceana Canada
I chose a career in fisheries science because I believe in the profound ecological, cultural, and economic benefits that healthy oceans and sustainable fisheries can provide. That belief is reaffirmed every time I sit with harvesters, Indigenous leaders, and government officials whose conversations — whether on a wharf or in a boardroom — are anchored in a common goal: rebuilding abundance so fisheries can deliver their full value for generations to come.
Yet each year, as I work through the data for Oceana Canada’s Fishery Audit, the same pattern appears: delayed stock assessments, missing benchmarks, and gaps in monitoring. These aren’t technical footnotes. They shape quotas, fishing access, and the long-term viability of coastal communities.
The uncomfortable truth is this: despite decades of commitments, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) continues to defer rebuilding many depleted fish populations. Every delay makes the future we want harder to reach.
After nearly a decade of tracking progress, the picture is clear. Canada has the ingredients for success — strong science, modern laws, and policy tools — but they’re applied unevenly. Only about one-third of Canada’s marine fish stocks are considered healthy. The rest are in the “cautious” zone, are severely depleted, or lack a health status because basic benchmarks or up-to-date assessments are missing.
This isn’t a failure of knowledge — it’s a failure of follow-through.
Implementation, not innovation, is the real barrier.
DFO has spent years and millions of dollars crafting modern policy — from precautionary and forage fish policies to updated monitoring requirements and 2019 Fisheries Act amendments designed to give depleted stocks a path to recovery. But these legal safeguards apply only to a small fraction of fisheries, 30 of nearly 200 major stocks. At the current pace, it could take more than a decade before all fish stocks receive the protections Parliament intended.
This gap matters.
DFO’s northern cod decision illustrates the risks of straying from legal safeguards and neglecting the tools to support stock growth. Despite warnings from federal scientists that the population has shown no meaningful increase since 2016 and faces a high risk of slipping back into the critical zone, the quota was more than doubled in a single year. Rebuilding a depleted fish population is challenging enough. Claiming to do it while ignoring science is misleading — and far more costly for the people who depend on those fisheries.
Climate change raises the stakes further. Forty-three per cent of stocks lack climate-informed science assessments or management measures, even as warming, acidification, and shifting currents upend ecosystems and the fisheries they support. We can’t govern the oceans of yesterday while casting our nets into the future.
The solutions don’t require new laws — just the conviction of using the ones we have.
DFO doesn’t need to reinvent its fisheries framework. It must apply it fairly, consistently, and transparently.
That means listing all depleted stocks under the Fisheries Act, so rebuilding plans are not optional. It means aligning management decisions with the best available, climate-informed science. It means strengthening protections for forage fish, the foundation of healthy ecosystems, so food webs that support commercial species can recover.
It also requires good monitoring and timely stock assessments, so managers, harvesters, and communities are working with accurate information — not uncertainty. Transparent decisions build public trust. And including Indigenous Knowledge Systems by collaborating with Indigenous Peoples improves management by drawing on generations of place-based stewardship and Indigenous authority.
Taken together, these actions create a coherent path to abundance, not scarcity management. Canada’s own laws and long-standing international agreements already require rebuilding depleted fish populations; what’s missing is consistent implementation of those commitments.
A future worth choosing.
Rebuilding fisheries is about more than fish. It’s about shaping a future where oceans remain a source of life, work, play, and opportunity for generations yet to come. Young scientists like me want to build careers that rely on collaboration and evidence-based solutions to tackle climate change and advance sustainable food systems. Strong fisheries are key to that future.
Progress is possible. Today, 34 per cent of critically depleted stocks benefit from rebuilding plans, up from just 11 per cent in 2017. Evidence from around the world shows that fish populations can rebound when given the chance.
But we are at a crossroads. DFO can turn policy into performance and build a legacy of abundance — or continue down a path where recovery becomes harder, slower, and costlier.
As I travel coast to coast this year to share the 2025 Fishery Audit with other scientists, harvesters, politicians, and DFO staff, I’m struck by the expertise, creativity, and commitment in every room. These conversations are shaping what Canada’s oceans and fisheries will look like decades from now. They give me hope. And they make one thing clear: meeting the challenges ahead will require DFO to focus its energy and accelerate progress in how fisheries are managed.
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