The War on Science by Chris Turner

The War on Science by Chris Turner

Author:Chris Turner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-77100-432-9
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2013-09-12T16:00:00+00:00


5

LOST IN

THE DARK

* * *

The View from the Museum

SPRING 2013

THERE’S A routine sort of chaos to Canadian government in the age of wilful blindness. It’s endemic, seemingly inevitable—there’s just so much being shifted around and knocked over with so little in the way of foresight. As a random example, a fuel storage tank for a generator at Environment Canada’s Canada Centre for Inland Waters in Burlington, Ontario, started leaking diesel in early 2011. As Mike De Souza of Postmedia News found out through an Access to Information request, an Environment Canada inspector reported the leak in March, but it wasn’t fixed until after a warning letter was sent the following April. To be clear, an Environment Canada inspector reported a dangerous fuel spill at one of Environment Canada’s own facilities, and nothing was done in response to the problem for more than a year. Small wonder that a report presented to Parliament by the federal environment commissioner, Scott Vaughan, argued that Environment Canada appeared to lack the wherewithal to respond adequately to infractions of its regulations across the board.

Another routine insult to scientific tradition: in early 2013, the DFO presented Andreas Muenchow, an American academic working alongside Canadian government scientists on an Arctic research project, with an agreement that would have required all his research to remain confidential unless he first received written consent from the government to make it public. Arguing that the new agreement was far more restrictive than a previous agreement he had made with the Canadian government in 2003, Muenchow refused to sign and posted the offending text on his blog. “The new draft language is excessively restrictive,” he wrote, “and potentially projects Canadian government control onto me and those I work for and with.”

The government’s relentless posture politics creates its own strains of chaos and absurdity. In the fall of 2011, for example, Parks Canada decided to organize a press conference to announce the creation of a new national park on Sable Island, off the coast of Nova Scotia. Parks Canada had spent a year negotiating the new designation with the government of Nova Scotia and decided to time the announcement to coincide with the centennial of the agency’s birth. When Parks Canada officials sent their agenda to the Privy Council Office (PCO) in Ottawa for approval, however, it was torn to pieces by allies of the prime minister. In the final days before the event, PCO officials summarily deleted the Parks Canada logo from a backgrounder document, demanded that the three Parks Canada officials who planned to join Environment minister Peter Kent and National Defence minister Peter MacKay on the dais be removed, and requested that an “ugly” Parks Canada centennial banner be taken down. The banner stayed, but the CEO of Parks Canada watched from the audience as MacKay informed the press that “50 years of conservation efforts culminate today with the Harper Government’s signing of this agreement.”

In political circles, this kind of shameless credit theft is sometimes called “bigfooting,” and it offers



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