Yeah, this is my assessment as well. It's quite demoralizing for several people I know working in sciences at DFO. When you have a PhD in a science and can't use it as it's intended because money matters more than the thing you study, it gets difficult to deal with on a day to day basis. It's not a trivial thing to get to that point in a career, but you, your knowledge, and your potential are completely kneecapped when it comes to most jobs competing with the well-being o the environment.

The leadership I do know of from second-hand information is hyper-focused on organization performance - they couldn't be further from the sciences, and they actively work to suppress science at times.

In fact, there's very compelling evidence of a significant factor in reduced salmon population, but that research was initially muzzled by the Harper administration, and since then, the findings were revealed but the research more or less put on hold. Some action was taken based on the research (shutting down salmon aquaculture near spawning rivers), but it's decades late and a decade later than the research came out.

Then we have the evidence that hatcheries put incredibly small amounts of harvestable biomass into the ocean while deteriorating salmon genetics. Salmon are evolved to thrive in their specific spawning territories at a critical, vunerable point in their life cycle; by muddying those genes, you can make it so they lose what gave them the ability to thrive at all. Meanwhile, hatcheries are so established and commonly believed to be so effective and it's exceedingly unlikely to see them go anywhere any time soon. We celebrate the addition of a hatchery but we may have been undermining salmon this entire time.

I could go on. It's a very sad situation and very close to my family and heart. Tomorrow I'm going to go free diving and soak it all in. I like to appreciate the beauty while it's still here and remind myself how important it all is.