“If you are fed up with the closure of federal scientific programs and muzzling of scientists, if you think that decisions should be based on evidence and facts instead of ideology, then please come out and show your support,” reads a news release urging “concerned” scientists and citizens to show up for the funeral to mark the “Death of Evidence.”
Like many protests, it’s all a bit melodramatic and there will be some of the usual anti-Conservative suspects including Maude Barlow with the Council of Canadians and Ted Hsu, the federal Liberal critic for science and technology.
But unlike many political protests, this one will have, potentially, hundreds of scientists. At least, that’s if organizers can convince the hundreds of delegates to a major conference on evolutionary biology that happens to be taking place in Ottawa this week to take a break and join the protest.
If that happens, it will be newsworthy, more so than having a mock casket and Grim Reaper stalking the streets of Ottawa.
Canadian scientists are notoriously reluctant to get involved in political debates, whether the topic be climate change or cuts to environmental research or amendments to federal laws. They tend to detach themselves from the public debate to concentrate on their academic work or to avoid attacks, for example, by the deniers of climate change. Whether sequestered in an ivory tower or locked in a bunker mentality, scientists are too often absent from debate.
And at the risk of sounding melodramatic myself, that is a serious problem for democracy.
If we are to make proper public policy decisions on issues such as releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere or releasing deleterious substances into rivers, we need to base those decisions on science. As American scientist and philosopher Lawrence Krauss has said, “Every major political issue has a scientific basis.”
That’s not to say scientists should be making the decisions in a democracy. Our elected officials should have the final say, but it is science that should provide the basis for political decisions.
The federal Conservatives seem to have got it the other way around, where they muzzle scientists or cut funding for research that contravenes their political ideology. They are fast-tracking environmental assessments and amending the Fisheries Act, all with an eye to building more pipelines more quickly from Alberta’s oilsands.
Canada’s international reputation for environmental protection has fallen in recent years to the point where observers have called us the “dirty old man of the climate world.”
Federal Conservatives say they believe in the science of human-induced climate change, but they are not acting as if they really believe.
On the international scene, Canada is gaining a reputation as an environmental laggard where politics comes first, science second.
That’s the genesis behind today’s protest. It is not just a funeral for the “death of evidence,” but for the death of responsible government.
There are, though, still signs of life. A faint pulse, perhaps.
Last February, the federal government and the government of Alberta took the unprecedented step of agreeing to work together on a joint-monitoring system for the oilsands industry. The plan would more than double the number of monitoring stations, increase the frequency of monitoring from once a year to once a month and make the data available for everyone to see. On paper, the new plan was so detailed, extensive and impressive that even critics were applauding, albeit cautiously.
Next week, the two levels of government will provide an update on how the new system is progressing.
One question they have yet to answer, though, is governance: who will oversee the system?
Currently, it reports to two government bureaucrats, one provincial and one federal, rather than a non-political, independent commission as recommended by Alberta’s Environmental Monitoring Panel, which studied the issue last summer.
The provincial government subsequently commissioned a report on the issue of governance that is expected to be released as early as next week. Included in the report, says a government source, are two options: one that would have the monitoring system completely under government control; the other would have a scientific panel act independently.
If the Alberta government really wants to demonstrate that it is doing things differently, more progressively, on the environmental front, it should give more power to the scientists.
That’s not to say the government give up its responsibility or power to make the final decisions. But it is to say that those decisions be based not on politics, but on science.
Article
Source: edmonton journal
Author: Graham Thomson
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