Party of One (20 page)

The VPs of the five universities—Alberta, Manitoba, Waterloo, Trent, and Lakehead—were advised that the Harper government was closing the ELA. The good news, however, was that the Conservatives were nevertheless “eager” to find a new operator for the facility. How eager? When the representative from Lakehead University asked about federal resources to run the new ELA, Gillis replied that neither the DFO nor Environment Canada would contribute any staff or budget to a new operator. The Government of Canada was washing its hands of the freshwater research business—divorce, with the very warmest of wishes.

Next came the “So-long-it’s-been-good-to-know-you” call to employees. It was made to scientific staff in the two federal departments affected by the closure. The call was preceded by an email inviting employees at the DFO and Environment Canada to participate in the conference call. The message made the usual declarations of appreciation for a job well done while at the same time kicking bodies out the door. (It could have been worse. When sixty-five staff at the National Research Council got the axe a week later, included in their termination letter was a $3 gift card for a coffee and a doughnut at Tim Hortons.) The ELA scientists were told that there would be no federal funds to operate the facility in 2013, and that if no private operator was found by April 1, 2013, it would be mothballed—or, in the incomparable bureaucratese of the moment, would “transition into cold lay-up.” As for terminations, the scientists would likely be gone before the facility itself was closed.

The final call, the one to external and university scientists working at the ELA, followed the same government talking points, but this time the director general’s message was more rigorously
challenged. This group had greater independence and posed questions David Gillis couldn’t readily answer. How could the government claim that other freshwater facilities could do the research of the ELA, when everyone on the conference call knew it was a oneof-a-kind facility? How could a new operator be found in a few months with no funding from Ottawa—especially with Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) funds already frozen by the Harper government? Since universities had short-term funding for their research programs, and the work at the ELA often unfolded over decades, it was ludicrous to think that academic institutions could operate the facility. Finally, the scientists wanted to know the DFO’s mandate. If it had changed, and that was why the ELA was being closed, exactly what was the department’s new mission? And if it hadn’t, which Gillis seemed to imply, why was the ELA being closed?

One of the scientists on the call remembered Gillis interjecting that the purpose of the discussion was to implement the decision, not to question it. If anyone wanted the ELA closure reversed, they were advised to express their preference in the traditional way—at the ballot box. It was pointless to appeal to the DFO because the department was obliged to carry out the government’s wishes, a decision that had been made by what Gillis referred to as the “federal family.”

The scientists who followed the coffin to Parliament Hill with their signs and their megaphones under the brilliant July sun were not part of that family. They had come to defend their métier, their colleagues who worked for government, and the country’s intellectual honesty. And there was one other thing on their minds: the desire to defy the Harper government’s assault on their fundamental right to free speech. One protester showed up with a telescope taped to his bicycle helmet and a sign that read “Looking for signs of intelligent life on Parliament Hill.”

The prohibition against speaking freely, including about research on climate change, the tar sands, and the protection of wildlife, had already garnered worldwide disapproval.
The Economist
described the Harper government’s muzzling as “comical excesses in communication control.” Others were less amused. Both
The New York Times
and the prestigious British science journal
Nature
slammed Canada’s government. The
Times
called Harper’s suppression of federal scientists “an attempt to guarantee ignorance.”

By April 2013, Canada’s information commissioner, Suzanne Legault, opened an investigation into complaints that departmental officials were silencing Canadian scientists. Six months later, the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada released a survey done by the Environics Research Group in which 90 percent of four thousand federal scientists who responded said they were being muzzled.

N
OT
EVEN
MEMBERS
of Parliament could find out what was really behind the decision to close the ELA. When Thunder Bay– Superior North Independent MP Bruce Hyer
²
requested permission to tour the site with an ELA scientist, he was turned down by a department clearly marching to the PMO’s drum. Internationally acclaimed scientist Ragnar Elmgren noted that closing the ELA was the kind of knowledge-killing decision you would expect from the Taliban, not the government of a Western democracy.

So that summer day in front of Parliament—Tuesday, July 10, 2012—two things were on the agenda for the two thousand people who listened to the speeches under the watchful eye of the RCMP. They were protesting the shuttering of a unique facility for research into freshwater, the world’s most important resource. They were also rejecting the notion that any federal government could reduce its scientists to compliant and wordless serfs, even under the provocation of a decision as absurd as this one.

Defend and defy they did, but with an appeal to reason that might have impressed the minister of science and technology, Gary Goodyear—if only he had shown up to listen to his own scientists. Dr. Vance Trudeau, professor of biology at Ottawa University, told the sea of white coats and an ever-growing band of curious onlookers that aspects of the Harper government’s social and environmental policies reminded him of the Duplessis era in Quebec. How, for example, could you plan the economic, educational, and social programs for a nation of thirty-five million without the data provided by a detailed census?

Dr. Trudeau had no partisan axe to grind. He praised the Harper government for promoting some aspects of applied science as a “very good thing.” But neither was he there to have politicians tell him that pure and applied science was an either/or proposition. It was, he said, a fundamental misunderstanding of science to promote applied science “at the expense” of pure scientific inquiry, which actually drives applied research. In the real world of science, the two go hand in hand, with pure science leading the way.

The enthusiastic crowd liked the sound of rational defiance. They shouted their responses to Dr. Trudeau’s litany of questions. “Would a physician tell you that you have cancer without a test?” he asked, waiting for the response. “No!” the crowd roared. “Would you even accept the diagnosis based on one test?” he continued. “No!” they shouted. “Do you demand that Parliament revisit their ill-intentioned and ill-advised decisions about science cuts?” he teasingly asked. “Yeeesss!” the audience thundered. “Yes,” he repeated. “Evidence can be resurrected.”

There would soon be more to get them applauding—fighting words from water activist Maude Barlow, and an appeal for the freedom of scientists by young Ph.D. students Katy Gibbs and Adam Houben. Then there was Dr. Arne Mooers from Simon Fraser University, a professor of biodiversity who noted that
evidence is how adults navigate reality. People were bound to lose their way in the fantasy world of the Harper government where propaganda was substituted for fact. “This sounds alarmist, even to me, and I am saying it,” Professor Mooers said. “But we should call a spade a spade.”

When it came to calling a spade a spade, few scientists in the country could match the person who spoke next. Jeff Hutchings has been acknowledged as something of a rare breed in his chosen profession—a gifted biologist and an indefatigable champion of the independence of science in the public domain. “This is like an inquisition,” Hutchings told me. “Who did you speak to, what did you say? And I can tell you that the international community, Norway, the UK, Sweden, the US, our colleagues are in a state of disbelief over what is happening here. The Soviet-style of information suppression—in Canada? If you disagree, you are shut out—it’s not careful thinking, it’s ideology.”

Hutchings, the former head of the Royal Society of Canada, was not supposed to be at the Death of Evidence rally. He was actually in Ottawa attending the First Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology, an event with more than 2,400 registrants—nearly two thousand of them from around the world. When he found out about the rally, he used his lunch break at the convention to join the marchers and to speak about the “death of evidence.” Hundreds of his colleagues followed him from the Westin Hotel to Parliament Hill: international scientists found it incomprehensible that Canada, once in the vanguard of evidence-based policy, was stifling its science and scientists.

There was a buzz in the crowd as the bespectacled Killam Professor of Science from Dalhousie University made his way to centre stage. Canada’s science community had already been alarmed by Harper’s steady assault on their budgets and research since coming to power. But they were stunned by the government’s
demolition of an environmental regulatory system that many of them had spent their careers building.

The March 2012 federal budget eliminated nearly three thousand environmental assessments, including scores of projects dealing with fossil fuels and pipelines. Was the government clearing the legislative deck to smooth the way for speedy and untrammeled resource development, including the construction of pipelines? That had certainly been the impression created six months prior to the Death of Evidence rally, when Reuters quoted from a policy paper generated by bureaucrats in Harper’s International Trade Ministry. In the paper, the bureaucrats described the National Energy Board (NEB) as an “ally” of the Harper government’s resource development plans. The government promptly disavowed the story, but it was not a confidence builder for the government’s critics. The NEB was, after all, holding hearings into the controversial Northern Gateway Pipeline, and would be advising the government on whether the project should proceed. It is a dark road from advisor to ally. On December 19, 2013, the NEB recommended federal approval of the pipeline.

Hutchings saw the death warrant for the ELA as part of a sinister pattern, an anti-knowledge, anti-science animus in the Harper government that had killed the long-form census, cut science funding, closed research installations, reduced atmospheric studies to 70 percent of their 2006 levels, and gutted critical fisheries legislation that left species at risk. Remarkably, the then DFO minister, Keith Ashfield, made the changes to the Fisheries Act contained in Bill C-38 without consulting his scientific staff— which might explain why the controversial omnibus legislation was leaked by someone in the DFO.

One of the most outrageous cuts was made in the autumn of 2013, with the decision to close seven of nine world-famous DFO libraries across the country. According to a leaked secret document,
the Harper government’s decision would save $443,000 a year, less than half of what Ottawa pays China for Canada’s rented panda bears every year.

Some of the closures were inexplicable. The government had spent millions of dollars modernizing the St. Andrews Biological Station in New Brunswick, only to close the famous library there, where environmental scientist Rachel Carson did research for her seminal book
Silent Spring
. Dalhousie University biologist Jeff Hutchings called the closures “an assault on civil society.” He said that “losing libraries is not a neutral act. It must be about ideology. Nothing else fits.”

While the Harper government poured $24.6 million into the new Canadian International Institute for Extractive Industry Development at the University of British Columbia, rare collections from the country’s marine science libraries, including fifty volumes produced by the HMS
Challenger
scientific expedition of 1872 to 1876, were being dumped in landfills.

Hutchings got backing from an unlikely source—former Conservative fisheries minister Tom Siddon. Siddon told CBC the move was “Orwellian because some might suspect it is driven by a notion to exterminate all unpopular scientific findings that interfere with the government’s economic objectives.” A research scientist who worked for the federal government for thirty years was quoted in
The Tyee
as saying, “All that intellectual capital is now gone. It’s like a book burning. It’s the destruction of our cultural heritage. It just makes us poorer as a nation.”

A
S
CATASTROPHIC
AS
the changes to Canada’s fisheries legislation were, they also placed a political dunce cap on the Harper government—or at least they did in the opinion of a strange trio of experts. Three former federal fisheries ministers came together in a non-partisan effort to steer the government away from making
what they viewed as a huge policy and political blunder. Liberal David Anderson and Conservatives John Fraser and Tom Siddon came out with a joint statement. As Anderson told me, he wrote the original draft, which was then sharpened by his Conservative colleagues. “I did a draft which I purposely softened so that I wouldn’t be seen as putting my colleagues into an uncomfortable partisan position as Conservatives . . . they actually took what I wrote and toughened it up. The reaction was very positive, lots of emails. People were very glad we had done it. There was an even greater level of unease out there over what they were doing to the fisheries and environment than I had imagined.”

Tom Siddon, the only former fisheries minister who was also a qualified scientist, said that Bill C-38 was an “appalling” attempt “to gut” the Fisheries Act. John Fraser, who in addition to having held the fisheries portfolio had also been Speaker of the House of Commons, declared that the politics of the omnibus legislation were “dumb” and that it was a mistake to portray critics as “left-wing radicals.” David Anderson, who was “surprised” at the level of cooperation from his former political opponents, said that greater fines by the Harper government for companies who despoil the environment wouldn’t accomplish anything. “Their incoming penalties, which they use to justify what they’ve done, amount to phony toughening. Bigger fines don’t mean anything in major projects. No one will be deterred.”