Justin Trudeau’s government has said it will phase out open-pen industrial fish farms off the coast of British Columbia by 2025. But both his government and the previous Conservative government were in possession of a newly released report that linked large-scale farms and wild salmon to the highly contagious Piscine orthoreovirus (PRV). Canada was warned in 2012 by its own scientists that a virus was infecting both farmed and wild salmon, but successive governments ignored the expert advice, saying for years that risks to salmon were low.

In 2012, biologists with the department of fisheries and oceans investigated the presence of the virus, which has been found in both farmed and wild salmon. In March, a federal information commissioner ordered the report be released, after a multi-year access-to-information battle between the group Wild First, which opposes open-pen salmon farms, and the federal government. Details of the report were made public last week by the Globe and Mail. A study last year from the University of British Columbia confirmed the findings, concluding that the closer wild Chinook are to fish farms, the higher the likelihood they’ll be infected by the Piscine orthoreovirus.

The Guardian reports that the decade-old findings take on a new urgency as both the federal government and officials in British Columbia grapple with a decimation of wild Pacific salmon stocks in the region, which experts fear could have far-reaching ecological consequences.

The BC Salmon Farmers Association said in a statement it would rather see peer-reviewed information about industry rather than “ad-hoc” releases through Canada’s access to information laws.