Governor General fires verbal salvo at shoddy science
OTTAWA — One month into her new job as Canada’s governor general, Julie Payette is taking on fake news and bogus science.
Payette was the keynote speaker at the ninth annual Canadian Science Policy Convention in Ottawa Wednesday night, where she urged her friends and former colleagues to try to shut down the misinformation about everything from health and medicine to climate change and even horoscopes that has flourished with the explosion of digital media.
“Can you believe that still today in learned society, in houses of government, unfortunately, we’re still debating and still questioning whether humans have a role in the Earth warming up, or whether even the Earth is warming up, period,” she asked.
“And we are still debating and still questioning whether life was a divine intervention or whether it was coming out of a natural process let alone, oh my goodness, a random process.”
She said too many people still believe “taking a sugar pill will cure cancer if you will it good enough, and that your future and every single one of the people here’s personalities can be determined by looking at planets coming in front of invented constellations.”
Payette was trained as a computer engineer and later became a licensed pilot and an astronaut. In 1999, she was the first Canadian to board the International Space Station.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has pledged to give science a more prominent place in his government’s policy-making, appointing a chief science adviser earlier this fall and undergoing a national science policy review that reported in the spring. The government’s response to the report is still in the works.
Payette clearly signalled her background will play a major role during her tenure as governor general.
She urged her former colleagues to aim to make science a topic so well-known and understood it becomes a subject of conversation at cocktail parties, just like the weather or the latest hockey scores.
She also noted that “the internet, social media, (and) 24-hour news” have meant considerably more information is accessible to the public. But while a learned society is a better society, fake news and bogus scientific claims have to be refuted, she said.