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Twenty-six years ago, in response to regionally devastating fisheries collapses in Canada, Hutchings et al. asked "Is scientific inquiry incompatible with government information control?" Now, a quarter-century later, we review how government science advice continues to be influenced by non-science interests, particularly those with a financial stake in the outcome of the advice. We use the example of salmon aquaculture in British Columbia, Canada, to demonstrate how science advice from Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) can fail to be impartial, evidence-based, transparent, and independently reviewed—four widely implemented standards of robust science advice. Consequently, DFO's policies are not always supported by the best available science. These observations are particularly important in the context of DFO having struggled to sustainably manage Canada's marine resources, creating socio-economic uncertainty and putting the country's international reputation at risk as it lags behind its peers. We conclude by reiterating Hutchings et al.'s unheeded recommendation for a truly independent fisheries-science advisory body in Canada to be enshrined in the decision-making process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examined spatial patterns of covariation in indices of survival rate (residuals from the best-fit stock- recruitment curve) across four decades among 43 wild pink salmon (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha) stocks from 14 geographical regions in Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska. We found strong evidence of positive covariation among stocks within each region and between certain adjacent regions (e.g., correlations from 0.3 to 0.7) but no evidence of covariation between stocks ofdistant regions (e.g., separated by 1000 km or more). This suggests that important environmental processes affecting temporal variation in survival rates of pink salmon from spawners to recruits operate at regional spatial scales rather than at the larger ocean basin scale. Based on limited fry abundance data, we found that this covariation in spawner-to-recruit survival rates may be strongly influenced by marine processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]