The unraveling of the Kyoto Accord in Canada, and all that goes with it, is primarily a tale of Orwellian Newspeak.In simpler times, we would have called it dishonest communication. That’s when you know that what you are saying is false but say it anyway in the interests of “goodthink”.
Peter Kent has become the latest Harper minister, joining the ranks of Peter MacKay and Tony Clement, to pound a round peg into a square hole in the name of the party line and political survival.
As a former journalist, Kent’s partisan bludgeoning of the facts is particularly unpleasant. When Kent was reading teleprompters for a living, you couldn’t survive in the news business without delivering the day’s best version of the facts. Newspeak wasn’t yet an option. Now Kent has voyaged up in the world by inventing facts on behalf of a political party that has won power. He is a champion of “bellyfeel”, blind allegiance to the party’s views.
I know this comes close to “crimethink”, but consider some of the whoppers the world was treated to by our Northern Pinocchio.
The minister said that the oilsands are environmentally friendly. He said that there is a disproportionate amount of criticism of the Big Dig. He said that Europe was discriminating against tarsands oil in issuing their fuel-quality directives against it.
Every statement is, as Orwell would have put it, “doubleplusungood” – at least under the fact-driven requirements of “oldthink”. It wasn’t as if the minister was laboring under a misapprehension when he got on that plane to South Africa. If that had been the case, Kent would be guilty of the merely garden variety managerial sin common to all ambitious over-achievers – incompetence. The fact is, the minister knew that what he said at the climate conference was false because officials in Minieco, otherwise known as the Ministry of the Environment, had already told him so months before young Canadians turned their back on him in Durban.
His own department had told him that Canada lacked “credible scientific information” to support the claim that the tarsands are environmentally friendly. His own department had warned him that regulatory shortcomings of the Harper government had cast doubt on the integrity of the environmental assessment of new projects – including the one that was idiotically – and, I suspect, purposely announced during the Durban conference. His own department told him that because of these shortcomings industry players were ill-prepared to defend themselves from the exclusionary policies of foreign governments who know dirty energy when they can measure it.
Perhaps Kent believed that the comic-book screed of, uh, “ethical oil” would trump science in the age of Twitter. If he did, here again Minieco was there to give him pause. Last June, his officials advised that “Getting the science right is important. We are committed to managing the environment in the oilsands based on science, not politics or PR.” They are obviously candidates for “Room 101”.
It is not surprising to me that the Harper government has once again turned scientists into “unpersons”. That is the core principle of decision-based evidence rather than evidence-based decisions. No one dispenses facts but “BB”. Science lives to unravel mysteries, astound, and relentlessly add to the fund of human knowledge because it insists on tested facts. Only “goodthink” can neutralize such heresy.
Speaking “fullwise”, science is about the discovery and testing of reality, not its manipulation. More importantly, its findings carry imperatives in a rational universe. When a government stops honestly communicating facts, that is when it starts practicing “goodthink”. It becomes a waste-land of toxic partisanship, half-truths and disguised special interests. After all, when the science shows your policies are nonsense, the policies should change. With this government, if policy and the facts collide, the science is gunny-sacked and the scientists muzzled. This is catastrophic for public policy. But as a communications strategy aimed at suppressing inconvenient truths, the policy has been “doubleplusgood”.
According to Minieco documents, the Harper government’s media rules for muzzling scientists introduced in 2007 virtually eliminated senior federal scientists from media coverage. Everything had to be “upsubbed” to the minister’s office. The biggest victim? Climate change stories. Mainstream media coverage of climate change fell by an astonishing 80 percent in the years since Canadian federal scientists had to ask political permission to speak publicly about their work.
In Newspeak, the scientists have been “rectified”. And with the “prolefeed” rotting brains from coast to coast, other answers were offered to explain climate change that were uncritically embraced – sun spots, magnetic hiccups in the earth’s core, livestock breaking wind. Not many Nobel prizes there.
The undeclared rule for the Harperites is that anything that’s bad for big business is just plain bad, science or no science. The dumping of Kyoto is just the biggest and crudest example of the Harper government tailoring public policy to corporate interests. Tory senators did exactly the same thing to Bill C-393 just before the last election, shilling for Big Pharma in the Senate after the House of Commons had already passed legislation to facilitate the production of cheap generic drugs that would have saved the lives of some of those suffering from HIV/AIDS.
Not many people noted it at the time, but it was the Harper government that put the National Research Council to work for private industry by changing its culture. Once upon a time, the NRC conducted basic scientific research that was world-class. It still does some of that, but now it has an increasing load of industry-related projects despite the negative impact that approach has on true scientific discoveries. Scientists know that almost always all major discoveries come from basic, pure research.
In another particularly gross act of pandering to corporate interests at the expense of science, the Harper government has begun to introduce multi-year quotas in the fishery, to cut scientists and researchers at the department of fisheries and oceans, and to reduce the number of research voyages that are used to assess the health of fish stocks. In the wake of the Great Northern Cod collapse, and the $4-billion it cost Canadians to deal with the ensuing social chaos, more, not less, science and regulation is called for – at least in a rational universe.
Ante-“BB”, Stephen Harper once described Kyoto as a socialist plot. That is perfectly in keeping with the man whose government went on to eliminate the position of National Science Advisor in 2008 and gave us a science minister who didn’t quite believe in evolution. It is also in step with the man whose government refused to release a report on the risk of cancer from chrysotile asbestos until Health Canada faced an access to information request and had no choice but to reluctantly cough it up. And it is perfectly consistent with allowing former crony and PMO insider Bruce Carson to turn the Canadian School of Energy and the Environment into an advertising agency to launder the grimy image of the tarsands at public expense.
All recollections for the “memory hole” no doubt, but at least it’s a change from all the “duckspeak”.
Origin
Source: iPolitico
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