I find it wild that the BBC never mentioned the most glaring underbelly of this:
New Brunswicks most significant employer for the past 100 years is Irving Oil & Irving Paper and Irving Forestry. They are different arms of a privately held family-run business, run by the descendants of the original founder (whose records are not as public as a traded company), in charge of the main industries of the province. They owned every newspaper in the province, and are known to be adversarial to any community paper, starting new papers just to drive out of business the small upstarts they don't own -- I've seen it play out in my community. People are literally afraid to criticize this family publicly, because they fund SO MUCH of the nonprofit sector. If you are trying to get a project off the ground, you can't look sideways at them or your project will be buried. And their papers certainly won't speak kindly of your criticism.
And most glaringly, one of their ex-Vice Presidents was premier of the province during this time.
So there is an extra level of concern that some locals have about the optics of the province shutting down the research.
The Irving family is highly manipulative of political affairs, and imho have held the province back for decades (e.g. influencing what schools get funded/built, to create the working stock that support their businesses, etc)