Controversial report to be made public

Mike Hager
October 10, 2011
The Vancouver Sun

A report that both the federal and provincial governments fought to keep secret will be released next week, the Cohen Commission ruled Friday.

Biologist Alexandra Morton claims her report conclusively links a virus from B.C.’s salmon farms to the decline of the Fraser River sockeye salmon population.

In his ruling, commission director Justice Bruce Cohen said Morton’s report, along with a host of others, deserve to be made public despite earlier attempts by government lawyers at the inquiry to bar the release of the biologist’s findings.

“The evidence that I read in the Cohen inquiry suggests that the wild salmon are dying of the pathogens that come out of salmon farms,” Morton said. “I know people would expect me to say that, but read my report — what’s in that report is just what the DFO has been saying.”

Morton’s report links a mysterious virus — which she identifies as leukemia — first present in B.C.’s farmed chinook salmon to the beginning of the Fraser sockeye’s decline in the mid-’90s.

Read the full story in the Vancouver Sun.