DFO scientist suspects Privy Council silenced her
CBC, Canadian Press, Posted: Aug 25, 2011
A federal fisheries scientist says she believes an order stopping her from talking about her research into the 2009 sockeye salmon collapse in B.C. came from one of the highest offices in Ottawa.
Kristi Miller told the Cohen inquiry examining the collapse of the Fraser River sockeye run in 2009 that she thinks DFO officials were okay with her talking to the media about her work published in the journal Science.
But she says the issue was taken out of their hands by officials in Ottawa and the order for her to be silent came from the Privy Council, which acts for the Prime Minister.
Environmentalists and union leaders have charged that Ottawa muzzled the molecular biologist.
But Miller told the commission she hasn't been stopped from publishing any research, and federal officials have told her not to speak to the public so she could reserve her comments for the inquiry.
Miller said she was told not to attend one scientific meeting but the demand was made of other colleagues, too, and the integrity of science has been upheld at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
Fisheries Minister Gail Shea said in a statement last month that Miller's work was available publicly on the commission website and that the government was committed to allowing the commission to do its work without outside influence.
Before Kristi Miller first testified on Wednesday, environmentalists held a rally outside the hearing to pronounce her "Scientist of the Year," but Miller's testimony didn't point to fish farms as the cause of the unexpected collapse of the 2009 Fraser River Run, like they had expected.
Miller testified that her research does show that a new virus may have caused the collapse of the salmon run, but she has not linked the virus or the collaspe to salmon farms on the wild sockeye's migration route through the Broughton Achipelago at the north end of Vancouver Island.
