New polling from Oceana Canada shows some 84 per cent of residents of Newfoundland and Labrador care deeply about rebuilding local ocean ecosystems and support pausing the commercial capelin fishery until the population recovers.

The 2023 capelin fishing quota announcement from DFO is just around the corner.

Capelin has been in the critical state for the last 30 years or so, and Oceana Canada is calling on Ottawa to manage the stock sustainably. A marine scientist with the organization, Jack Daly, says pausing the capelin fishery would allow it to rebuild.

Capelin is a forage fish, a species important to the state of many other species but Daly says it has been in an overfished state for 30 of the past 32 years.

Daly hopes that DFO follows its own policy and allows the stock to rebuild. The fish are spawning later and maturing earlier, events which have negative effects for the next generation to come into the fishery.