A qoute from Dr. Kristi Miller-Saunders given in evidence at recent House of Commons Fisheries Committee hearings;
" When I started down this path of research in 2012, I was told by an upper manager, who's no longer with the department, that it was irresponsible to ask research questions that could potentially result in negative economic ramifications on an industry if we did not already know the answer. At the time, my lab was developing very powerful technology that could simultaneously quantitate 47 different pathogens—viruses, bacteria, and fungal parasites—in 96 fish at once. We had populated this platform with assays to virtually all the infectious agents that were known or suspected to be pathogenic in salmon worldwide, including many that were associated with emerging diseases in other parts of the world but that had never been assessed in Canada. The manager was concerned that by employing this technology, we would make our salmon in B.C. look dirty, and impact their economic value in the market, and that if we uncovered agents that were not known to be endemic, ENGOs and the public would immediately point to the aquaculture industry as the culprit. As such, the attitude was don't look closely, especially for things that we didn't know already were there. It took almost two years to get approval to go ahead with this technology, which we are now employing on over 26,000 wild, enhanced, and farmed salmon in B.C."
http://www.parl.gc.ca/HousePublicat...m=FOPO&Mee=38&Language=e&Mode=1&Parl=42&Ses=1
There are more interesting tidbits as well. Dr. Miller-Saunders testimony begins at 1645 in the link above.
