Defenders of fish farms, does this not make you wonder what is going on, not too transparent is it.
Back in September, it was revealed at the Cohen Commission that Dr. Kristi Miller’s work on salmon leukemia was being directly controlled by the Prime Minister’s Office in Ottawa. In particular, the PMO intervened to ban Miller from responding to media requests in the days leading to the publication of her research in the prestigious journal Science.
At Cohen, we also discovered that DFO had cut off all funding – that’s zero dollars – for Dr. Miller’s critical research on salmon. To our knowledge, the funding still remains cut off to this day.
When the first positive results of ISA were discovered, The Provincial Government made the accusation that the original samples that tested positive had been destroyed. In an ironically self-defeating comment (since it was later confirmed that the samples were fine), Liberal MLA. D. McRae said in the BC Legislature: “Well, we've got another example of spinning media headlines and fear mongering from the opposition.”
Around the same time, Province-of-BC lead veterinarian Dr. Gary Marty was asked by CBC Radio about the multiple cases of jaundiced salmon that Alexandra Morton had found in the Fraser River with heavily diseased livers. With a straight face, he answered that those may have been (wait wait wait) albino fish. What about their diseased livers? Ah yeah, albino fish with a drinking problem, I guess.
Perhaps one of the more disturbing recent incidents. After ISA was discovered, many members of the public such as myself posted the lab results on their blogs, as a public service. The director of the lab that had done the testing, Dr. Fred Kibenge, wrote to salmon activist Don Staniford asking him to remove the lab results from his blog, because “this information was not intended for the public and should not be posted anywhere publicly”.