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The Canadian Medical Association, which has been locked in an ongoing battle over issues of editorial independence with the Canadian Medical Association Journal, has abruptly dismissed the journal's editor, Dr. John Hoey, and his deputy, Anne-Marie Todkill.

“We were both fired,” Ms. Todkill confirmed Tuesday night from her home in Ottawa. Ms. Todkill said they were informed of their dismissals on Monday.

She declined to elaborate on the reasons given, saying “I'm not at liberty to talk about this.”

“I hope I can comment at some point,” she added.

Word of the firings reverberated through the medical and health-care communities Tuesday.

“I think he was a very competent and courageous editor — and I think he had suffered the consequences of that,” Terry Sullivan, president and CEO of Cancer Care Ontario, said of Dr. Hoey.

“Here you have a guy who led the CMAJ to become one of the top five general medical journals in the world and now it appears he is being silenced by the profession.”

CMA Media, the CMA-owned company that publishes the journal, announced in a brief and barely visible statement on the journal's website that Dr. Hoey would be leaving his post effective immediately. The statement was dated Monday. It made no mention of Ms. Todkill's firing.

Neither Dr. Hoey nor Graham Morris, president of CMA Media and publisher of the journal, was immediately available for comment.

Dr. Hoey and his team had been locked in an ongoing struggle with the owners of the journal over the issue of editorial independence for a number of years.

In mid-December, Dr. Hoey accused the CMA of censuring the journal's news content. The accusation, made public in an editorial, said Morris refused to allow the journal to publish an article about a survey it had done to test how willing Canadian pharmacists were to dispense the morning-after contraceptive pill, called Plan B.

The original article, which was not published, said pharmacists were violating women's privacy rights during sales of the drug by demanding and then registering into a computer database identifying information about women buying Plan B.

Dr. Hoey said the Canadian Pharmacists Association complained to the medical association, which insisted the item be dropped. Morris defended the decision by calling the attempt at investigative journalism unethical research.

When Dr. Hoey made the interference public, he named a blue-ribbon panel to outline for the CMA the boundaries of editorial autonomy. That panel had not yet issued a report.

Ms. Todkill said deputy editor Dr. Stephen Choi was designated to serve as interim editor.