Take this article with a grain of salt. You normally can't quietly and quickly shut these types of things down. It would be on the CBC and especially something like this would be very hard to pull off. Here is why:

1. Obvious environmental concerns about oceans and fisheries.

2. The conservative base is pro-government regulation of fisheries.

3. The conservative base is sentimental, and destroying first copies of anything would piss them off.

4. Newfoundlanders (man is it hard not to write "Newfies") gave up a shit ton of prosperity after joining Canada by having the government come in and regulate their fish stocks. (To be fair, they didn't have much choice. If they had kept going there would be nothing left in 5 to 10 years. No I'm not exaggerating it was fucking bad.) For the conservative government to do something that widely flies in the face of that would be to piss off an entire province.

5. The government is under a lot of flack by gutting the census and by muzzling federal employed scientists, this would make voters across Canada balk.

6. Canada is fighting off illegal Chinese and Portuguese fishing boats. These libraries contain information that is useful if we're ever going to get reparations from them.

7. No clear motive for doing so. It isn't like big oil has made a giant spill and the conservatives are trying to cover up the environmental damage or anything.

8. I fail to see this being reported on the CBC, and they would be all over this.