Cod fishing on Canada's eastern coastal waters was halted in 1992 for two years, with the plan being that the population would recover and they could start fishing again. Did you think the population recovered and they just decided not to start fishing again because they forgot? Or that they just had woken up one day and decided to take the drastic step of banning fishing and throwing 30,000 people out of work and destroying one of their thriving industries because nothing had happened to the fish?

The collapse happened before the ban, not after. And they took long enough to notice and implement it that the fishery was driven to total, semi-permanent collapse before the ban, to an extent that they didn't fully realize until several years had gone by and the fish still hadn't recovered.

Here's a pretty detailed summary of the before and after. In 2005, after 13 years of the ban, the cod biomass off Canada's coast was still about 3% of its pre-industrial-fishing levels. That's why there's still a ban: Not that they just hate sending out boats and bringing in fish, but that the population's still fucked and not really recovering, and so any fishing would be simply giving some additional cleaver-whacks to the already dead golden goose. I don't know what the numbers are now, but I would be surprised if they are dramatically better, and I think the chart I cited is an extremely honest and vivid picture of the results of overfishing, and not loaded or anything else as-fuck.