The War on Science

Muzzled Scientists and Wilful Blindness in Stephen Harper's Canada

Chris Turner

• Publisher: Greystone Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781771004329
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A passionate and meticulously researched argument against the Harper government's war on scienceIn this arresting and passionately argued indictment, award-winning journalist Chris Turner contends that Stephen Harper's attack on basic science, science communication, environmental regulations, and the environmental NGO community is the most vicious assault ever waged by a Canadian government on the fundamental principles of the Enlightenment. From the closure of Arctic research stations as oil drilling begins in the High Arctic to slashed research budgets in agriculture, dramatic changes to the nation's fisheries policy, and the muzzling of government scientists, Harper's government has effectively dismantled Canada's long-standing scientific tradition. Drawing on interviews with scientists whose work has been halted by budget cuts and their colleagues in an NGO community increasingly treated as an enemy of the state, The War on Science paints a vivid and damning portrait of a government that has abandoned environmental stewardship and severed a nation.

1

MARCH OF
THE LAB COATS

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The View from the Street and the Lab
SPRING–SUMMER 2012

THE PROTEST march that snaked through the streets of Ottawa on the morning of July 10, 2012, was, in some respects, a standard affair. The marchers carried placards and chanted slogans, a roster of speakers made high-minded speeches, the police redirected traffic and kept a watchful eye. Under a bright blue sky, the protesters marched from the Ottawa Convention Centre past the Chateau Laurier to Parliament Hill, drawing the curious interest of the odd tourist or passerby, but mostly tromping down the streets of the capital with order, purpose and calm.

The only obvious signs that this was a protest unique in the history of Canadian public life were the crisp white clinical lab coats on dozens of the protesters and the geeky twist they gave to a familiar chant.

“What do we want?”

“Science!”

“When do we want it?”

“After peer review!”

A young woman carrying a scythe and wearing the black hooded robe of the Grim Reaper led the procession, followed by a clutch of pallbearers bearing a prop coffin aloft. The march had been billed “The Death of Evidence.” It had been organized and was largely peopled by scientists—field researchers, lab rats, graduate students—and it was, as far as anyone marching was aware, the first time their ranks had ever assembled to stage a protest on Parliament Hill.

Scientists are by professional tradition and often by general disposition a cautious, reserved lot. They place the highest virtue on reasoned argument and cloistered study, proceeding from the core belief that scientific evidence, objectively gathered and impartially analyzed, must always trump opinion and argument and shouted slogan in the establishment of what is true and reasonable and which courses of action best serve the public interest. They conduct their public discourse as much as possible in the meticulous, technical language native to peer-reviewed scientific journals. That the scientists in Ottawa had taken their conversation to the streets, amplified it, reduced it to the crude exigencies of a placard’s slogan—this all spoke to a catastrophic decline in the harmony of their usual dialogue with Canadian government.

In Canadian public life, there had for generations been a sort of implicit understanding between scientists and politicians, between those who gathered and analyzed the data and those who used the resulting studies and white papers and policy briefs and committee testimonials to enact legislation. It went roughly like this: federal law and public policy would always have recourse to the best available evidence. Any number of political persuasions and points of view could be represented in the public discourse—rabid socialists and staunch libertarians, rapacious capitalists and bleeding-heart liberals, Tories and Grits, Dippers and Greens—but scientific evidence existed outside this cacophonous arena of competing opinions. The parameters of the entire debate were established by observable, verifiable, peer-reviewable reality, not by political expediency or strategic advantage. Even if this evidence-based social contract was not always honoured in full, it had never been unilaterally negated. Politicians might elide inconvenient facts or omit problematic details in the name of short-term gain, but they weren’t permitted to dismiss the scientific method itself as irrelevant to the formulation of policy. At some point you had to acknowledge the basic facts of the situation. Didn’t you?

Since Stephen Harper’s Conservatives had first formed a government in 2006, the pact between evidence and policy had eroded and crumbled and then finally given way at some fundamental level—the one that sent scientists marching in their lab coats on Parliament Hill. The process had been slow and sporadic at first—esoteric programs cut here and there, experts and their studies forced into the custody of media handlers, their conclusions massaged to corroborate talking points dictated by the Prime Minister’s Office. The campaign intensified in fits and starts through the minority years, with rumblings about discounted evidence and silenced scientists accompanying the elimination of the Office of National Science Adviser, the cancellation of the long-form census, and the tabling of a sweeping crime bill that went against decades of research.

In the first year of Harper’s majority, though, the scientific community’s concerns turned quickly to outrage. Seemingly every other day through the spring of 2012, news broke of another slashed budget or shuttered research facility as the Conservatives rolled out Bill C-38, their omnibus budget bill. Cloaked in the plain cloth of financial necessity, the bill seemed intent on rewriting the whole contract between scientists and policy-makers.

“It was staggering,” Dalhousie University biologist Jeffrey Hutchings told me. “It seemed like every week there was something new happening. And it got to the point where as a Canadian scientific community, not only were we thinking what’s going to happen next, but there was so much, we didn’t actually know how to respond. And it really felt like a boxer who’s just been punched so many times, it’s all you can do to stand up.”

On July 10, Hutchings made his stand. He was in Ottawa for a conference on evolutionary biology, an event co-sponsored by the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution. Hutchings, the society’s president, was a co-host, and there was plenty for him to attend to inside the conference hall. But the march’s organizers had been in touch, encouraging him to participate. It wasn’t an easy decision. He was wary of the planned Death of Evidence march, concerned that his involvement might be interpreted as political advocacy or the pursuit of personal gain. “I don’t want to be advocating for anything other than the communication of science,” he said. “So I was a little reluctant.”

A chat with a journalist just a few days before the march finally swayed him. On the appointed morning, Hutchings left the conference centre and stepped out onto Colonel By Drive in his crisp white lab coat, melting into the ranks of his white-coated colleagues, all of them joined together in wordless solidarity with the protest’s simple assertion that scientific evidence was sacrosanct, that the final arbiters of truth toiled not in the House of Commons but in the laboratory. Phalanxed by placards, chants echoing in their ears, the nation’s foremost evolutionary biologists began their march on Parliament Hill.

The placards themselves told a shorthand version of the story. One near the front of the ranks bore the march’s semi-official motto: “NO SCIENCE/NO EVIDENCE/NO TRUTH/NO DEMOCRACY.” Another put it more bluntly: “STOP HARPERS WAR ON KNOWLEDGE.”

The marchers had first assembled outside the convention centre because a good many of them were, like Hutchings, in town for the conference. The First Joint Conference on Evolutionary Biology was one of those insular academic affairs whose symposium titles spoke in language guaranteed to exclude all but the fully initiated. Influential symbionts: Master manipulators of adaptive host behavior. Genome evolution and speciation: “Next-generation” genomics of parallelism and convergence. When scientists spoke to each other, this was their preferred lexicon—technical and data-driven, footnoted and impartial.

The protest’s ranks had been filled out by busloads of instructors and grad students from McGill, Queen’s and Waterloo, as well as a handful of more seasoned activists rallied by the Council of Canadians. But for most of the people following the Grim Reaper down Colonel By Drive that day, this was their first-ever protest march.

A petite, dark-haired young woman who had positioned herself to the side of the avenue watched anxiously as the marchers shuffled past, a megaphone clutched in her hand. This was Katie Gibbs, just weeks from completing her PhD in biology at the University of Ottawa. She was one of the few scientists present who had any real experience in the blunt craft of politics. Gibbs had been active in the federal Green Party for several years, and she was a co-organizer of the Death of Evidence march. She’d been there when her colleagues first proposed the idea of a protest on Parliament Hill over pints at an Ottawa pub a few weeks earlier, and they’d chosen her as lead organizer. Her colleagues, who had previously treated her outspoken political stance as a strange and potentially dangerous character flaw, were finally ready to concede that the Conservative government led by Stephen Harper had left them with no other avenue for dissenting dialogue. “It was interesting,” Gibbs said, “to see their minds shift to the point where they seemed to realize that if we don’t stand up for science then nobody else is going to.”

As her peers strode past on the morning of the march, Gibbs craned her neck to try to find the end of their ranks. She’d been a nervous wreck about the turnout. If five hundred people came, at least she wouldn’t be embarrassed. She was hoping for a thousand, but no one who had cut their political teeth on the Green Party fringe could be so foolhardy as to expect all their best-case scenarios to play out. As she watched, though, her anxiety turned to exuberance. For several amazing minutes, she couldn’t find the end of the line. The marchers just kept coming.

There was a makeshift Dixieland jazz band at the front of the march alongside the pallbearers, bopping its way through “When the Saints Come Marching In.” It lent a jaunty cadence to the marchers as they strolled past Gibbs—young and old, long-haired and bald-pated, in shorts and sandals or in button-down business casual. An older couple in matching Tilley hats, a young couple with one baby on the mother’s hip and another in a stroller. Lab coats, black T-shirts, sundresses. Certain sections of the march, full of smiling faces and floppy summer hats and cameras, could have been mistaken for a sightseeing group expelled from some outsized tour bus. Gibbs hollered into her megaphone from time to time to instruct the neophyte marchers on how to stay in an orderly line. Someone had mounted a telescope on top of his bike helmet. One lab-coated woman held a sign up that read “WE ARE NOT RADICALS.” Another sign said simply: “[CITATION NEEDED].” By the hundreds and hundreds, they just kept coming. The RCMP would eventually fix the estimated size of the crowd at two thousand, but Gibbs was sure it was larger than that by a substantial margin. And although it was far from a rowdy crowd, it was an exhilarated one.

Gibbs: “A lot of the people who participated really were scientists, and for a lot of them this was the first kind of activism or public campaign that they really had been a part of. I think for most of them this was the first time marching in the streets. So there is that kind of indescribable buzz that comes from doing something like that with a lot of other people.”

One of the first marchers to reach the steps of Parliament’s iconic Centre Block was Diane Orihel, a PhD student in aquatic biology at the University of Alberta. She was scheduled to address the crowd once it had fully assembled on the broad concrete expanse in front of her. Like Gibbs, she goggled at the size of her audience. “I was just overwhelmed with the number of people who came out to support us,” Orihel recalled. “I remember standing on the steps of Parliament Hill and just watching the people flood the square, and they just kept coming and coming and coming. Soon the RCMP had to let people overflow onto the grass, because they had completely filled the entire area.”

FOR ORIHEL, THE journey had begun six weeks earlier in bewilderment, fury and despair. She had arrived at her office at the Freshwater Institute in Winnipeg on the morning of May 17 for a business-as-usual day. A colleague told her an emergency meeting of the whole institute staff was just about to start. “This can’t be good news,” the colleague said.

No scientist working on a federally funded project in the spring of 2012 could have been wholly complacent about their job security, especially if their field was in the environmental sciences. Bill C-38 had unleashed a broad frontal assault on the Canadian environmental science community. Tabled in the House of Commons six weeks earlier, the bill had triggered wave after wave of closures and “affected letters” (notices of potential or impending layoff) at research institutes, monitoring stations, and government labs across the country. The bill’s “scale and scope,” wrote the National Post’s Andrew Coyne, “is on a level not previously seen, or tolerated.”

Here is Coyne’s summary of the bill’s extra-budgetary dimensions:

It amends some 60 different acts, repeals half a dozen, and adds three more, including a completely rewritten Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. It ranges far beyond the traditional budget concerns of taxing and spending, making changes in policy across a number of fields. . . . The environmental chapters are the most extraordinary.

In an op-ed in the Guelph Mercury, Cynthia Bragg argued that “the federal government is taking a sledgehammer to environmental protection across Canada.” In truth, it was more like a hundred vicious scalpels, and one of them had sliced away the Experimental Lakes Area (ELA), the array of fifty-eight small lakes in northern Ontario where Orihel and her Freshwater Institute colleagues conducted their research.

The news at the institute’s emergency meeting was devastating. Orihel: “They all received affected letters, workplace suggestion letters, and were basically told to go out to the ELA and get their stuff out of the lakes, get the stuff out of the labs and pack it up, and no new research was to be done. They were also specifically warned that they were not allowed to communicate with the media or the public about the ELA.”

The ELA is not a lab in any conventional sense but rather a sort of contained biosphere where experiments sometimes involve altering the fundamental biology and chemistry of a whole lake—or several lakes—for years at a stretch. It may be the most important freshwater research facility on the planet, and its researchers—co-founder David Schindler of the University of Alberta, in particular—had made discoveries of global import, uncovering the mechanisms by which acid rain poisons aquatic ecosystems and industrial phosphorus runoff damages freshwater chemistry. Given the scale and duration of the typical ELA experiment, the orders from Ottawa were akin to asking farmers to pack up their farms. (With a bumper crop in the ground. In the midst of a global famine.)

Because she was not a Freshwater Institute employee but a grad student, Orihel was one of the few ELA insiders who could respond freely. She soon found herself the de facto press officer for the ELA’s defenders. She had never written a press release in her life, had to be told what the expected length was, where to place her contact information, how to put an old newsie’s “-30-” at the end. “The next day I was so overwhelmed with media,” she said. “And I realized that I had to be the public face of this, because all my colleagues were muzzled. I was an effective hub through which information could get out, because I have been working at ELA for ten years. I have had close relationships with the current and former scientists for the last decade. I was perfectly aligned to be the public face and I had the least to lose, because I can’t be fired.”

The day after her debut as press officer, she established a grassroots organization, dubbed it the Coalition to Save ELA, and circulated a petition. By early June it had attracted 1,700 signatures, and Orihel flew to Ottawa to take the petition to Parliament. She organized four press conferences at the National Press Theatre and brought in scientists and opposition MPs to defend the ELA’s track record. And she met a fellow grad student named Katie Gibbs, who had just started to organize a march on Parliament Hill.

FOR THE DEATH of Evidence march, Orihel wore a long gown in funereal black. Her head was half covered in a black scarf, and she gazed through dark sunglasses over the crowd stretching away from the Centre Block steps. She stood flanking the mock coffin, a couple of steps behind co-emcees Katie Gibbs and Scott Findlay. Findlay’s inclusion had been Orihel’s idea. She knew the protest needed at least one public face that was not a youthful student’s, someone who couldn’t be dismissed as a usual suspect. It was too easy for the media to write off the march as a summer lark by a bunch of students with nothing better to do. Findlay was a professor at the University of Ottawa, a working evolutionary biologist with a list of peer-reviewed publications to his name. He lent gravitas, made the soapbox safe for other speakers on the rally’s docket: Jeff Hutchings; Arne Mooers, a biodiversity professor at Simon Fraser; Findlay’s U of O colleague Vance Trudeau.

Katie Gibbs spoke first. She read a short obituary for evidence and introduced her fellow speakers as “eulogists.” “We are here today to commemorate the untimely death of evidence in Canada,” Gibbs announced. “After a long battle with the current federal government, evidence has suffered its final blow.” The crowd responded with hoots and howls of “Shame!” The eulogists, using the stump speech rather than the professorial lecture as their model, kept their comments to a brisk two minutes or less. Vance Trudeau talked about the wilful blindness of the government’s “anti-science” ideology. “The tendency to only use the data and evidence you like is the misuse of information for alternative purposes,” he said. “This is known as propaganda.” The next speaker was Arne Mooers, who worried about the country’s ability to address the challenge of climate change without the best available data. “To deny evidence,” he said, “is to live in a fantasy world.”

Hutchings, despite his earlier reluctance to join the march, revealed a firebrand streak and a deft rhetorical touch. “Freedom of expression is no longer a right enjoyed by Canadian government scientists. These individuals paid by taxpayers to undertake research in support of society are not permitted to speak to Canadians unless they have ministerial permission to do so. When you inhibit the communication of science, you inhibit science. When you inhibit science, you inhibit the acquisition of knowledge. Government control over the ability of society to acquire knowledge has alarming precedents. An iron curtain is being drawn by government between science and society. Closed curtains, especially those made of iro...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1: March of the Lab Coats
• 2: Landscape at Twilight
• 3: From Dawn to Dusk
• 4: The Age of Wilful Blindness
• 5: Lost in the Dark
• Selected Chronology of Canadian Science
• Source Notes
• Acknowledgements
• Index