The way your (brief) sentence is written it sounds as though the government is given a good deal of credit for imposing the moratorium, whereas there's a good deal of evidence to suggest that they consistenly mis-managed it. It looks as though a combination of poor ecological models, concentration on simple resource production statistics, consulting only with large capital holders instead of small, local stakeholders led to this avoidable collapse.

Over-fishing in the maritimes was mostly as a result of "free-trade" liberalisation including transferable/sellable fishing licenses which led to a decrease in small, family operations and an increase in massive, mortgaged industrial fishing operations.

The small family business typically engaged in long-lining (single lines with multiple hooks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longline_fishing ) which did not require great capitalization/debt. These business became non-viable as larger operations flooded the market with fish caught by dragging -- a method which leads to the destruction of the seabed ecosystems which in turn decreases the catchable population.

This is one of the good references on the topic, pretty readable (Dean Bavington, _Managed Annihilation_, 2010 UBC Press): http://www.ubcpress.ca/books/pdf/chapters/2010/ManagedAnnihi...

Thanks for the link to the book, it looks like an excellent read. I'll be digging into that tonight.

Yes, the show points out exactly what you say. There was an increase in large scale, industrial fishing using huge trawling boats that quickly depleted the resources.

It seems this is an ongoing theme - as humans we just think natural resources will never run out.