OTTAWA — The federal government “really doesn’t grasp what science is about” and could find itself unable to respond to averse environmental changes because it has abandoned climate change and water pollution science, say scientists interviewed for CBC’s The Fifth Estate.
“What we have done in Canada is turned off the radar. We are flying along in an airplane and we put curtains over the windshield of those pilots of that flight crew and we’ve turned off the instruments. We don’t know what is coming tomorrow let alone next year in terms of some of these potentially catastrophic incidents,” said former government scientist Peter Ross in the CBC episode Silence of the Labs, which airs Friday night.
The scientists said that, under Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government, funding has being cut from pure science — such as research on climate change — and is instead being funnelled towards projects that benefit industry and commerce. At the same time, scientists are being restricted from talking to media and all messaging goes through “a spin machine.”
“My ability to convey important findings to the general public, to the electorate, to the taxpayer, had been severely curtailed,” said Ross, a marine mammal toxicologist who once gave frequent media interviews about contamination of Canada’s waters, wildlife and northern people. After years of not being allowed to talk to media, his department was terminated in the spring of 2013 because his work was deemed to be no longer important.
In 2008, Postmedia News — then Canwest News Service — obtained internal government documents that outlined how Environment Canada was muzzling its scientists by mandating all media inquiries be sent to Ottawa where communications specialists would help scientists develop approved messages.
“Just as we have ‘one department, one website’ we should have ‘one department, one voice,’ ” an Environment Canada PowerPoint presentation reads.
Postmedia News has continued to uncover examples of government scientists being silenced in recent years.
Documents obtained under access to information law showed that fisheries scientist Kristi Miller was forbidden from speaking to media in January 2011 after she published a landmark study about the decline in farmed salmon in the Fraser River. Similarly, ozone scientist David Tarasick was not given approval to talk to reporters about a study he published on an Arctic ozone hole in the fall of 2011.
Additionally, an Ottawa Citizen investigation in the spring of 2012 showed U.S. government contributors to a study on snowfall pattern were happy to speak candidly to reporters, while Canadian government scientists working on the same study could not talk. Instead, 11 government employees spent a day emailing back and forth to agree on “approved” lines that did not directly address the paper’s questions.
“They’re feeding the public a bunch of hogwash and I think most people would accept that you can’t run a democracy and make it function on a public informed with B.S.,” former government scientist David Schindler told the CBC.
Canada’s information commissioner Suzanne Legault confirmed in the spring that she is investigating whether the government is breaching access to information law by restricting what its scientists can say.
