Occam's Razor says the simplest explanation that fits all known facts is the one most likely to be correct.

All those niggly details about things like fossils and evolution and stuff can be soooooo inconvenient ........

I live in Kingston, Ontario, and grew up in Labrador. I've been all over the Canadian arctic over the years. I find it hard to get excited over a news report of a snowstorm - to me, that's about as newsworthy as a report that the sun came up in the morning. Even if it was reported (I don't remember), I sure as hell wouldn't have paid any attention to it.

Alert, NWT for the win (82.30N, 62.20W) - I had two tours there while in the military. Enough so that I now consider Labrador, where I grew up, as being in the south (Only 52.90N)

You had LIQUID nitrogen? Where I grew up, our nitrogen was frozen solid, and we damned well liked it that way.

I grew up in Labrador. We have two seasons there - Winter, and Mosquito.

The report in TFA is from the Elections Commissioner, who is NOT a member of the conservative government. Given the frequency with which he pisses off *all* parties, it's pretty safe to say that he's in nobody's pocket.

J Edgar Hoover. 'nuff said.

For the same reason that witnesses aren't allowed to talk to other witnesses before their testimony, why juries are often sequestered - or if not, invariably forbidden as a matter of course to not discuss the case with anybody else, or read news coverage of the trial they're on, etc - to avoid influencing somebody else's testimony, and to maintain impartiality so that any decision is based only on the evidence presented in court.

Also - I know I'm sounding like a broken record - she has NOT been prevented from reporting her results. That was done when she was published in the Lancet. She's been forbidden from talking to reporters till after she's testified - nothing more, nothing less.

Am I the only person here who's actually read TFA? Her paper has been published in the freaking LANCET

Do you have any idea how the government works? How many levels up the food chain she would have had to go to get permission to submit the paper in the first place? How many times it would have been reviewed by her bosses, on multiple levels, before it was allowed to go out the door? If this is what you call suppression, then every federal politician should be shot to remove them from the gene pool, and every civil servant in that department should be fired for being too stupid to live.

Is she also forbidden to speak at conferences, to her fellow scientists? Has she been told she also can't talk to others in her department, involved in the same areas of research? Other colleagues in her area of expertise, who don't work at Fisheries? Well, I don't know, and neither do you or anybody else here - because TFA doesn't mention it. Bottom line - there is nothing in that story that supports a claim of repression. The fact that the article was published at all makes it false on it's face. Hell - I came up with a reasonable, rational argument for why this may have been done while reading the article in the first place - it's not like it took any large amounts of brain power, so you can't exactly jump to conclusions and scream "THIS IS THE REASON! THIS IS THE REASON!".

WHAT damage? Salmon are dying on the west coast. Not exactly news - it's been happening for years. Federal officials have conducted a study, and think they may have a lead on the cause .... and published the results in one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world. How is any of this possibly bad news? What is there to be suppressed?

Right. Well, the paper was published in February - and there's still a queue of how many reporters wanting to talk to her, 7 months later? She's due to testify in August - without knowing the dates, she could be on the stand and done within the next week, or it could be a long as 30 days. Either way, I doubt they're all going to disappear that quickly, of they've been waiting this long and are still interested.

Occams Razor: The simplest explanation that fits all known facts is the one most likely to be correct.
So tell me - what do you think is the simplest explanation - that they want to hold off till she's finished her testimony sometime within the next month, or that's it's a plot on the part of the federal government to suppress a report that shows progress for solving a major economic and environmental problem that can't be suppressed because it's already been published?

Or, maybe it wasn't a joke. Maybe - just maybe - I was trying to make sure that people knew that what I was saying was strictly my own opinion, based only on the information that's available to everybody else - ie, TFA.

In the immortal words of Grouch Marx ..... sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar.

I know people love to call anybody even remotely right of centre fascists, and that they love to see conspiracies in everything .... but I'm having a hard time trying to think of a scenario where publishing a peer-reviewed paper in a journal as prestigious and well-known as the Lancet could possibly be considered to be "keeping people in the dark". But hey, that's just me.