After thinking about it more I bet a 50 cm size minimum(no slot) province wide would also be effective.
The problem with the previous 50 cm size was that not enough fish were getting big. But the reasons for that were 2 fold.
A) It was being used on lakes that were open to retention while other lakes were C&R or tags. This leads to uneven fishing pressure.
B) The limit was usually 3 which was too high on some if not most of these lakes.
If they set a province wide 1 over 50 cm limit then some lakes that see tons of pressure would still not grow many big fish(like say Pigeon) but that wouldn't really change things that much as even with the tag system there are very few fish over 55 cm...
Lakes that see less pressure would still produce bigger fish(Slave Lake being an obvious example that continues to produce fish even with a 43 cm limit).
Then if necessary to control populations of small fish on certain lakes that are being overrun they could use a tag system for those small fish. Say tags for 40-50 cm and set the tag numbers a bit low so it doesn't require yearly monitoring but still helps to reduce the number of small fish allowing the rest to grow faster and bigger.
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