This article complicates how Canadian universities are pressured to capitalize on research and how these same pressures affect both the collaborative and community-based research within the academy by privileging one type of research and relationships within community over others. Through examining historical influences on Research Ethics Boards in Canada, ways these pressures shape qualitative research and disturb how and what we know, as well as what can be known about who and how we work move in and out of focus. Questions are raised about living ethically as qualitative researchers within an institutional context. (Contains 3 notes.)