Tories’ war on experts
The Harper Shift looks at how Canada has changed over a decade of Conservative government and, at this pivotal moment, at what kind of country we want to become. Here, Chris Turner examines the Tories’ dismantling of Canada’s fact-finding apparatus.
A month-long series
Speaking at a campaign event in suburban Ottawa on Sunday, Conservative Leader Stephen Harper told his audience that the jobs and benefits enjoyed by those toiling for the city’s biggest employer — the federal government — were not at risk if he is re-elected next month. “They should not be worried,” he said.
Civil servants could be forgiven for finding little comfort in this reassurance — not just because tens of thousands of jobs have been slashed from federal payrolls under Harper’s Conservatives already, but because there has not been a Canadian government more openly hostile to the role of civil servants in policy-making since Robert Borden’s government passed the Civil Service Act in 1918.
In the mounting public outcry on this topic, the focus has fallen on federally employed scientists — especially ones trafficking in truths so inconveniently disposed to Conservative political goals that the scientists have been directly muzzled, barred from discussing their work with the media.
This is often referred to, in shorthand, as a “war on science” (the title of my 2013 book on the subject), but it’s best understood as a broader hostility toward any expert point of view out of sync with the Conservatives’ predetermined line on a subject.
As University of Toronto philosopher Joseph Heath wrote regarding Conservative crime policy, “Hostility to expertise in all of its forms is the closest thing that Canadian conservatives have to a unifying ideology.”
The crux of the matter is that experts, especially in technical and scientific fields, are beholden not to short-term policy goals but to verifiable facts. And Harper’s Conservatives have demonstrated time and again that they are more than happy to ignore, manipulate, even eliminate problematic facts to get what they want.
This is particularly true regarding climate change, which is in a sense this government’s original sin on the science file. In their quest to establish the country as an “energy superpower,” the Conservatives chose not to balance that goal against Canada’s tradition of environmental stewardship and its stated greenhouse gas targets so much as to dismantle the former while spinning preposterous yarns about the latter. In pursuing resource-driven growth that was certain to make their climate targets unattainable, the Conservatives got a taste for a full frontal assault on basic facts, and they found they quite liked it.
This is one of Stephen Harper’s most distinctive and potentially lasting fingerprints on the country after a decade in power — a dismissive smear across the government’s fact-finding apparatus that has substantially diminished its ability to tell Canadians who they are, what’s happening in their country and how their government’s policies are affecting their lives and their world.
The two signal attacks in this war on expertise are the 2010 cancellation of the long-form census and the 2012 omnibus budget bills. Taken together, they reveal the strategy behind the war and illustrate its lasting impact.
Killing the long-form census is perhaps the less comprehensible measure. It was an act of wilful self-blindness in which the Conservatives deliberately chose to gather much less information — of lower quality — about what is happening in the country to figure out how to run it. It only makes any kind of sense in light of Harper’s stated distaste for those meddling eggheads who “commit sociology” and other sorts of egregious liberal artistry using the data gathered by the census. If you’re tired of dodging reports showing that your crime bill won’t reduce crime and your economic policies don’t improve the economy, why not simply compromise all the numbers feeding them?
The 2012 omnibus budget bills were a more full-throated articulation of the an- ti-expert agenda. They hacked and slashed through government-funded laboratories and science programs, as well as rewriting more than 70 separate pieces of legislation in a radical diminishment of Canada’s environmental stewardship program.
The reworked Fisheries Act now no longer protects more than 80 per cent of the freshwater species of fish facing extinction it used to cover. The Navigable Waters Protection Act, which once guarded millions of bodies of water from reckless development, now applies to less than 200. (The “Idle No More” movement among Canada’s First Nations began as a direct response to the enormous reduction in protection of indigenous rights this represented.)
As the bill made clear, the Conservatives see no government priority higher than enabling the rapid extraction of natural resources. Government-funded university research has been reconfigured to favour studies with obvious commercial benefits ahead of pure research, and the National Research Council is being overhauled to serve as a “concierge” to industry. Environmental NGOs, meanwhile, have been demonized as foreignfunded pawns of a “radical ideological agenda” and subjected to nuisance audits under an earmarked Canada Revenue Agency fund.
As a result of this multivalent war on expertise, the Canadian government now toils under a diminished and demoralized civil service and a well-earned reputation at home and abroad for being wholly contemptuous of real action on climate change. On the plus side, a substantial amount of the damage can be easily repaired by a new government ready to once again take experts seriously and properly support their work. The war, after all, has been almost entirely one-sided.
Chris Turner is a Calgarybased writer. His most recent book is How to Breathe Underwater, an essay collection.