It's not just overfishing, it's habitat destruction by draggers. And seals. And management plans that were driven by industry requirements. Most of all, the fishery collapse is the result of everyone expecting someone else to change while the first group kept on doing what they were doing.   

In the late eighties the folks at Employment Canada were actually predicting more jobs in fishing, even as the stocks were close to disaster. The thing was, they were building more and bigger boats, so by counting berths, they figured more jobs. Duh.

Easy to blame "foreign" trawlers; of course, the cod don't care what flag is on the boat that scoops them up. Now it's nothing but foreign trawlers, (outside, or dancing around on the 200-mile-limit) since the fishery is closed closed closed to Canadians.

I'm not against the seal hunt, never have been for the simple reason that no one has ever explained to me why it is an environmental issue. It's always been pitched as an animal rights, cruelty issue. You can deal with cruelty concerns by proper regulation and enforcement, not by shutting the hunt down. Even greenpeace isn't much involved in the seal hunt anymore--nothing about it on the current Greenpeace Canada homepage greenpeace.ca, ditto for sierraclub.ca

Jimmy C, the concept of "permitting 25,000 seals to live" is a pretty weird one to me. The inference is that you could get all the cod back by killing all the seals. The hunt this year is expected to kill about 300,000 seals, which is a big chunk of the population. If they were only going to "permit" 25,000 seals to live, it would be an environmental problem.   

This from International Fund for Animal Welfare, the biggest group campaigning against the hunt:

"The Canadian government is proposing to go even further by initiating a massive harp seal cull, revoking a 15-year old prohibition on the killing of baby hooded seals and establishing so-called "seal exclusion zones" - vast areas of ocean within which every seal will be exterminated."-- see IFAW press release, Nov 2002

"Undersealing?" Not any more, gnu.