Yesterday, we exclusively reported that the provincial government was shopping for a new farmed fish health database because their current computer system is "dysfunctional and cannot be relied upon to produce accurate or timely statistics, reports, data or information." As a result, agriculture and land bureaucrats have had to manually collate aquaculture fish health statistics. And that has Living Oceans Society executive director Jennifer Lash questioning those statistics.

"We've always known there's a problem," said Ms. Lash. "But I think what I'm a bit shocked about is that they've been doing all of this manually." The reason: "if you're manually coallating the data, the possibility of error is very high...I'm shocked! We have better database at Living Oceans Society than it sounds like the provincial government has."

But, in an interview with Public Eye, agriculture and land communications director Liz Bicknell took issue with Ms. Lash's assessment, noting "It's more cumbersome to do it manually. But it doesn't in any way alter the credibility of the data. Because the data is the data."