In the past five years the federal government has dismissed more than 2,000 scientists, and hundreds of programs and world-renowned research facilities have lost their funding. Programs that monitored things such as smoke stack emissions, food inspections, oil spills, water quality and climate change have been drastically cut or shut down.
This week, scientists went public with concerns that irreplaceable science could be lost when Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) libraries are closed. DFO plans to shut down seven of its 11 libraries by 2015. Already, stories have emerged about books and reports thrown into dumpsters and the general public being allowed to rummage through bookshelves.
The government responded that the information will not disappear. On Monday, DFO told CBC News that “all of its copyrighted material has been digitized and that the rest of its collection will be soon.”
On Tuesday, the fifth estate received a statement from the office of Greg Rickford, Minister of State for Science and Technology, and the Federal Economic Development Initiative for Northern Ontario.
"Our government has made record investments in science," it stated. "We are working to strengthen partnerships to get more ideas from the lab to the marketplace and increase our wealth of knowledge. Research is vibrant and flourishing right across the country."
Members of the scientific community disagree. CBC’s the fifth estatespoke to scientists across the country who are concerned that Canadians will suffer if their elected leaders have to make policy decisions without the benefit of independent, fact-based science.
“Canadians are going to have their government have to make policies based on much less fact and data and information, it’s going to be more ideologically driven,” Turk said.
Science vs. economics
Resource development in the oil sands of Alberta has also turned a number of Canadian scientists into critics of the Harper government, raising alarms about the long-term environmental and health consequences of oil extraction.
Before he retired in the fall of 2013, for example, David Schindler was a professor of ecology at the University of Alberta, where his research raised concerns about pollution from the oil sands. His research team found that the resource project was contaminating the Athabasca watershed, and many fish living there were developing deformities. When his findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Schindler was criticized by both the Alberta and federal governments.
'For those who do not want to see certain types of development, it will be gutting. But for people who are expecting appropriate oversight of new developments, but want to see socially responsible development emerge - some people may see that as a positive.'- Peter Phillips, specialist in public policy and science
Now he’s become an outspoken critic of a government ideology that he says is putting economic development ahead of all other policy objectives.
“It’s like they don’t want to hear about science anymore,” he said. “They want politics to reflect economics 100 per cent - economics being only what you can sell, not what you can save.”
But Peter Phillips, a specialist in public policy and science at the University of Saskatchewan, argues cuts to federal programs and institutes do not necessarily mean that science has been decimated, but rather that excessive regulation has been reduced.
“I think what’s happened is there’s been a rebalancing. To some people that’s gutting, because it changes the balance of power in these processes,” he said. “For those who do not want to see certain types of development, it will be gutting. But for people who are expecting appropriate oversight of new developments, but want to see socially responsible development emerge - some people may see that as a positive.”
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