Report | November, 2023

Fishery Audit 2023

 

Oceana Canada’s annual Fishery Audit assesses the current state and management of Canada’s fish stocks, tracks progress and provides recommendations to meet federal policy commitments. This year’s Audit reveals, for the seventh year in a row, that Canada’s fisheries are continuing to decline. There is persistent mismanagement, overfishing of stocks and a failure to rebuild depleted populations despite growing urgency and government commitments to act.

The status of Canada’s marine fisheries can be summed up as:

  • Unhealthy: A third of marine fish and invertebrate populations are either critically depleted or in the cautious zone, and less than one-third can be considered healthy.
  • Without a status: Nearly forty per cent of all marine fish and invertebrate populations are classified as uncertain due to insufficient reference points and stock status information.
  • Without a plan: Only six of 28 critically depleted stocks have a rebuilding plan, and none of those are high quality. These few plans fail to meet the criteria laid out in the Fisheries Act rebuilding regulations. There were no new rebuilding plans published this year despite legal requirements to do so for 13 critical stocks by 2024.

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