Science for Canada’s Shelf-Seas Fisheries

From an analysis of major national and international policy issues we judge that a vast cultural and political transformation is now underway. In particular, the common property–open access–willing consent regime towards fisheries development and management will be replaced by some workable alternative. For example, a system of national quotas based on stock by stock total allowable catches, subject to an overall constraint of "full utilization," will likely be found to be impractical. These and related aspects are elaborated for fisheries, and apply also to other resource and environmental issues. Scientific information and research programs must obviously relate to such developments.Canada is reasonably well endowed with conventional scientific and technical competence on fisheries matters. Important and potentially useful innovative science has languished recently; appropriate institutional infrastructures and planning processes to stimulate and direct fisheries science within the country have been absent for several years. Scientific services on the whole remain unorganized. Given these circumstances our recommendations are aimed toward development of perspectives and mechanisms that will help set the scientific process in motion into new directions where necessary. The major "gap in knowledge" relates to the inability of so many conventional disciplined scientists to understand other disciplines’ approaches and we propose a variety of means by which such constraints may be relaxed.A Canadian perspective for tomorrow’s science, related particularly to shelf-seas fisheries resources, should include the following. The client institutions that will use scientific information and insight will likely be organized in three geographic areas: inshore national waters, shelf and nearshore seas, and the distant deep ocean. The three basic components of a balanced scientific information system are: area maps, temporal series of monitored data, and models of causal mechanisms derived from experimentation and simulation. Decision-making is a transdisciplinary activity and appropriate frameworks are needed for identifying relevant research. A policy that users and abusers of resources and the environment should pay for their respective benefits achieved and disbenefits externalized implies that the separate and joint effects of the various uses and abuses be measured. Technical services and scientific research must be made more effective, efficient, and accountable, but must be flexible to accommodate both individual creativity and further political changes.We recommend that 1) separate foci be identified and appropriate infrastructures be developed for carefully planned transdisciplinary programs in: mapping; monitoring; management–harvest protocols; and modeling research involving synthesis, experimentation, and simulation. 2) New fisheries policies and agency infrastructures now developing should include the capability to undertake sophisticated experimental management on an ongoing basis. 3) Some further explicit division of labor is advisable, within the group of scientific and technical personnel, to produce three sets: technical experts whose work is dictated by programs; mission-oriented generalists to take the lead in planning and directing scientific information services and research activities with special accountability responsibilities; and self-directed creative scientists to innovate and ruminate. 4) Scientific credibility, now slumping, must be recaptured — in part by insulating key scientists from direct political involvement within national and international decision-making. 5) Canada’s sea-going research capability is lagging behind that of some other nations and must be enhanced accordingly. These practical recommendations all relate to the five aspects of the broad perspective sketched earlier. The recommendations are not listed in priority sequence and we advise that action should now proceed on all of them.