Government ignores expert advice
Once again, the government of Newfoundland is telling everyone else to shut up and sit down — they know what’s best. I’m honestly just so tired of this.
Our government is running this province into the dirt. They are allowed to blatantly ignore the truth, telling experts in their fields they are dead wrong, with little and less to back it up. Environmental specialists are wrong. Political analysts are wrong. The people of Newfoundland are wrong. Methyl mercury analysis teams were wrong, and the Conference Board of Canada is wrong. Seems like everyone in the country is wrong except for Dwight Ball and Cathy Bennett.
The kind of blatant disregard for scientific authority, coming from those who are meant to make nuanced, educated decisions for our province is, to say the least, disgusting, and in my opinion, incredibly insulting to the scientists, analysts and researchers who conduct rigorous studies so that politicians can ignore the facts in favour of short-term profit.
I ask then, for what purpose do we have scientists, economists, political analysts and the like? Because it seems entirely redundant to rely on such learned persons for objective, scientific data, only to ignore them and reject their findings the moment it becomes inconvenient to your agenda.
The Greek philosopher Socrates once said: “I know one thing: that I know nothing.” Socrates thought himself the wisest man in Athens, not because of his vast knowledge or experience, but because he accepted his own limitations and acknowledged that he knew very little in the grand scheme of things, as do we all. Socrates did not claim to know that which he did not, but accepted the limits of his knowledge and sought answers elsewhere. Today, Socrates is known for his insight as the founder of Western philosophy — the moral of this little story being that you won’t get anywhere by acting on pretended knowledge and things you don’t understand.
Dwight Ball and Cathy Bennett could stand to learn from Socrates I think, because they’ve done little else but refute those who know more than them, and make major provincial decisions in blatant disregard of evidence and data relating to the issues (recent austerity measures jump to mind, as well as the government’s dismissive attitude towards the potential for methyl mercury poisoning in Muskrat Falls).
At the end of the day, the problem is this: we have teams of scientists, analysts and economists in order to conduct research and give us the best possible knowledge, objectively, of a given situation, economically, scientifically, etc. Political leaders are expected to consider all the relevant facts when making their decisions, which often affect the livelihood of thousands, including whatever scientific and economic factors contribute to the situation.
Issues arise when political leaders fail to make beneficial decisions for the public, due to their own ignorance, wilful or otherwise, of the findings of scientists and analysts. It’s a two-way relationship, but unfortunately the power dynamic only goes one way. Because our government officials have next to no accountability for their actions, there is absolutely nothing preventing them from telling the scientists “you’re wrong,” even if they clearly are not. Therefore, there is nothing whatsoever to prevent them from silencing scientists the moment that science becomes inconvenient to their political agenda, because even if everybody knows you’re wrong, nobody can tell you no, and that’s a scary thought. Eric Richard Torbay