Storm brews over media minders for scientists
Ottawa to record polar conference interviews
Government media minders are being dispatched to an international polar conference in Montreal to monitor and record what Environment Canada scientists say to reporters.
The scientists will present the latest findings on everything from seabirds to Arctic ice and Environment Canada’s media office plans to intervene when the media approaches the researchers, Postmedia News has learned.
Media instructions, which are being described as a heavyhanded attempt to muzzle and intimidate the scientists, have been sent to the Environment Canada researchers attending the International Polar Year conference that started on Sunday and runs all week.
“If you are approached by the media, ask them for their business card and tell them that you will get back to them with a time for (an) interview,” the Environment Canada scientists were told by e-mail late last week. “Send a message to your media relations contact and they will organize the interview. They will most probably be with you during the interview to assist and record,” says the e-mail obtained by Postmedia News.
The memo, signed by Kris- tina Fickes, an Environment Canada senior communications adviser, goes on to say that recordings of interviews are to be forwarded to the department’s media relations headquarters in Ottawa.
Mark Johnson, an Environment Canada spokesman, says there is nothing unusual about the plan, which he describes as “standard practice” and consistent with the government’s overall communication policy.
Others see it as the latest evidence of the warped culture of obsessive information control inside the Harper government.
“Until now such a crude heavy-handed approach to muzzle Canadian scientists, prior to a significant international Arctic science conference hosted by Canada, would have been unthinkable,” says a senior scientist, who has worked for Environment Canada for decades. He asked not to be identified due to the possibility of repercussions.
“The memo is clearly designed to intimidate government scientists from Environment Canada,” he says. “Why they would do such an unethical thing, I can’t even begin to imagine, but it is enormously embarrassing to us in the international world of science.”
Climatologist Andrew Weaver, at the University of Victoria, agrees.
“It’s going from bad to worse,” says Weaver, a vocal critic of the way the federal government has been silencing and muzzling scientists in recent years.