Canada’s top scientist sure her role having an impact
OTTAWA — Canada’s chief science adviser admits her first year on the job was not exactly what she’d expected.
“I survived,” Mona Nemer says, laughing.
“It was an exciting year. Lots of things to learn. In many ways it was a great job offer because it didn’t have any to-do list. It was just very broad, and you could define the position.”
Her role, she says, is not to be a lobbyist. She isn’t there to tell politicians or public servants what to think or what decisions to make.
Since September 2017, her job has been to help them find the scientific evidence they need to make decisions.
But first, Nemer says, she’s had to figure out how decisions get made at all.
Nemer, 61, is soft-spoken, her English precise but slightly accented. Born and raised in Lebanon, she moved to Kansas for university and ended up at McGill University in Montreal more than three decades ago to complete grad school.
Seated in the boardroom in the suite of offices assigned to her and her staff of 15, Nemer clutches a white coffee mug stamped with the words: “I’m a scientist. What’s your superpower?”
With a PhD in bio-organic chemistry, she has been in the lab as a cardiac gene specialist, helping isolate genes that contribute to certain heart conditions.
Her work helped develop diagnostic tests for heart failure and birth defects. She has held a Canada research chair and, for more than a decade, she was the vicepresident of research at the University of Ottawa.
But she had never spent much time inside a government.
“Simplistically, I thought there was a place you just weigh in and make sure things are happening, but it’s actually much more complex than this,” she says.
“It turned out that, actually, my broad mandate and some of the specifics that I was tasked with were easier said than done.”
Canada hadn’t had a science adviser for almost a decade. The former science-adviser position existed between 2004 and 2008 but was abolished when Stephen Harper was prime minister.
Nemer’s office had to be built from the ground up.