Canadian scientists join fight against Trump
Academics write letter calling on Trudeau to protect research data under threat
University of Victoria environmental law professor Chris Tollefson sounded the alarm on the Harper government’s suppression of scientists in 2013, prompting a wide-ranging investigation of six government departments.
Well-known American scientists jumped into the fray, joining 800 international counterparts in a letter protesting prime minister Stephen Harper and urging him to reverse cuts and stop muzzling scientists.
Less than four years later, the big chill has migrated south, as U.S. President Donald Trump has installed senior officials with records of antiscience views — including Scott Pruitt, an environmental protection head who has called global warming a “hoax.”
Trump’s “kinder, gentler” speech to Congress Tuesday did little to brighten the dim prospects for environmental and health sciences — he pledged to further cut regulations, including allowing speedier approval of food and drug products. The next day, the Washington Post reported that Trump plans to cut staff at the Environmental Protection Agency by 20 per cent.
This month dozens of Canadian scientists and academics signed an open letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, cabinet ministers and opposition leaders, calling on Ottawa to limit the damage done to science.
The letter asks Trudeau to take the lead and expand Canada’s investment in science “to maintain scientific integrity in the service of human and planetary well-being.” It suggests that Canada should become a refuge for scientists and research targeted by Trump, as well as a world leader in recruit other countries to support American science.
“The well-being of humanity and all life on earth now depends on maintaining efforts in environmental and related sciences to limit the human-caused damage to the planet,” it said.
“There is a very real danger that this new U.S. administration, by not only muzzling science, but actually destroying data, will undermine years of research in a variety of areas,” said Tollefson, who backs the letter and is now executive director of the Pacific Centre for Environmental Law and Litigation.
Already, the signs are ominous. President Barack Obama’s information page on climate change was scrubbed from the web on Trump’s Inauguration Day. Gone were mentions of global warming and in their place the new administration vowed to eliminate “harmful and unnecessary policies” that protect the air and water.
In the days that followed, Trump signed an executive order to strike down a provision against dumping mining waste, calling it “another terrible job-killing rule.” Congress remains poised to attack other antipollution measures to promote the fossil fuel industry.
Meanwhile, Trump has tweeted that vaccines are “doctor-inflicted autism” — an utterly debunked position — and vowed to drastically cut federal science agencies. Scientists are facing restrictions on communication with colleagues and the public. Some climate change researchers, according to Scientific American, have already applied for jobs in Canada. Top graduate researchers from other countries have diverted their applications to Canadian institutions.
After the Trump election, one of the first distress signals was answered by University of Toronto’s Michelle Murphy, who joined a “guerrilla archiving” movement to help U.S. scientists preserve crucial data in danger of vanishing from the Internet.
The director of U of T’s Technoscience Research Unit, Murphy travelled to University of Pennsylvania for “hackathons” to download U.S. government data from the Internet before it could be deleted.
In Toronto, she called in volunteers to help identify programs and publicly accessible data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for archiving — a head-spinning six million pages with no site maps for guidance. “When American colleagues reached out it made sense that we had something to offer, in terms of our experience from the Harper years, and because our lab knows how to bring together technical and academic projects,” she says.
Laurie Allen, an assistant director at University of Pennsylvania libraries, says that the project is vital because the mass of data on the Internet creates a false sense of security — but in reality “our shared civic information is vulnerable.”
U.S. government documents published some 50 years ago were printed and deposited in a federal library program, which made copies available “to anyone who wanted them,” she points out. Now, “we rely on a single source. Access is easier, but not more secure.”
There’s also insecurity among the American scientists working in areas such as climate change, renewable energy, environmental protection, public health, agricultural research, stem cell research and transportation safety.
“They’re freaked out, and with good reason,” says Laurel Kurtz, executive director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. “They’re reaching out to us because they’re concerned.
“We’ve seen scientists threatened with defamation suits for correcting the record on climate misinformation. Open records have been lost. They’ve received nasty notes. Trump has poured gasoline on the fringe (elements.) People on the fringe are now in the mainstream.”
Some scientists, Kurtz says, are worried about accepting media interviews or publishing blogs for fear of retribution.
There are also looming cuts for research, including in the National Institutes of Health.
“What happened in Canada (under Harper) was a sense of déjà vu for Americans who monitored science and policy during the Bush administration,” says Michael Halpern, a deputy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Although American scientists had to battle opposition from George W. Bush’s administration, he adds, the threats that Trump poses are more serious. “We have somebody under consideration for the Food and Drug Administration who doesn’t believe clinical trials are necessary; we should just approve drugs and the market will sort it out.”
Halpern says that the upside of the election is that Trump has become “the gateway drug for scientists to get involved and stand up for the scientific enterprise.”
Many are standing their ground and pushing back against the administration’s incursions. A large Washington protest is planned for April 22, Earth Day.
Trump’s immigration ban has already had “significant consequences” for scientific collaboration — but could make Canada a destination of choice for top ranking American and international scientists and raise its profile in the world.