WHY SCIENTISTS HAVE CAUSE FOR CELEBRATION JACK KNOX A3
By now, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve seen Jody Paterson’s Facebook post.
Even after all those years writing a column for the Times Colonist, she’s stunned at how this one took off.
Which speaks to a lot of pent-up emotion over the Orwellian approach to the flow of scientific information under Stephen Harper’s Conservatives.
Jody’s post, written Friday, was in response to the news that Ottawa had lifted the gag order on federal government scientists.
It came after her son, a Vancouver Island federal fisheries biologist, wrote his own jubilant status update Thursday: “It is official. At an all staff meeting today with some of the best scientists in the world, certainly the ones who know our coast better than anyone (and I am lucky enough to work for some of them) we were told that it’s OK to talk to the media or anyone about what we do, without permission. That’s how surreal it was. That’s how it changed overnight.”
Jody’s post included her son’s comments, adding some of her own: “I feel like I’m in one of those postapocalyptic movies where there’s nothing but darkness and sorrow and hard times, and then right at the end of the movie there’s a scene of the sun rising over a new world and it’s like everything might just turn out OK. People, we must never again let our government plunge us into such a fearful, secretive divisive state.”
And then things took off. Her screen began flickering as her post began to spread across Facebook — 2,000 shares, then 4,000, then 10,000. The media came calling. Jody was gratified at first, then overwhelmed.
“It’s really weirding me out,” she wrote from Nicaragua, where she does volunteer work. Kind of cool to be retweeted by Margaret Atwood, though.
Jody wasn’t the only one celebrating. Having banished the ban, Justin Trudeau was bathed in praise for striking a blow for open government.
He’ll probably want to remember this moment when the decisions get tougher and the adulation turns to scorn (charismatic politicians always have the most spectacular crashes) but right now the prime minister is picking the lowhanging fruit, undoing some of the more obvious wrongs.
And have no doubt, the muzzling of scientists was wrong. This wasn’t just another policy decision made on left-right grounds — whether to build a pipeline, or legalize pot, or scrap the long-gun registry, or run a deficit. In those cases you may or may not agree with the decision, but you can at least understand the arguments for and against.
The muzzling of the scientists, by contrast, was flat-out Machiavellian, a matter of controlling and suppressing inconvenient information.
It began several years ago when researchers who routinely offered expert background to media and the public were told they must henceforth go through government communications departments.
That matches a general (and regrettable) drift toward information control by all levels of government, but the degree to which Ottawa applied a political filter to even the most innocuous questions was bizarre.
In practice, media requests often became like throwing a rock into a black hole as the spin doctors fretted over crafting a politically palatable response.
Sometimes the results were just silly.
In 2014, a Canadian Press request to interview a Nanaimo scientist about his breakthrough research into the algae known as “rock snot” precipitated 100 pages of emails by 16 government communications professionals, but no interview.
An Ottawa Citizen attempt to get some simple info on a Canada-U.S. snowfall study led to at least 11 government staff swapping dozens of emails before providing the newspaper with a non-answer answer; happily, the Citizen got what it needed in a 15-minute phone call to the Americans.
Sometimes the results were more serious.In 2011, Nanaimo fisheries scientist Kristi Miller wasn’t allowed to talk about research that found a virus could be killing Fraser River sockeye salmon. “Media coverage of climate change science, our most high-profile issue, has been reduced by over 80 per cent,” stated a 2010 internal document at Environment Canada, where scientists were muzzled in 2007.
Open government is supposed to be one of the pillars on which democracy is built. Suppressing information for political purposes is a cynical abuse of that principle.
Which brings us to a Jody Paterson tweet on Monday: “Now that news of unmuzzled fed scientists has public’s attention, let’s turn to provinces’ anti-communication policies.”
Yup.