Slashdot Mirror
Canadian Government Muzzling Scientists
IllogicalStudent writes with this excerpt from The Vancouver Sun:
"The Harper government has tightened the muzzle on federal scientists, going so far as to control when and what they can say about floods at the end of the last ice age. Natural Resources Canada scientists were told this spring they need 'pre-approval' from Minister Christian Paradis' office to speak with journalists. Their 'media lines' also need ministerial approval, say documents obtained by Postmedia News through access-to-information legislation. The documents say the 'new' rules went into force in March and reveal how they apply not only to contentious issues, including the oilsands, but benign subjects such as floods that occurred 13,000 years ago. They also give a glimpse of how Canadians are being cut off from scientists whose work is financed by taxpayers, critics say, and is often of significant public interest — be it about fish stocks, genetically modified crops or mercury pollution in the Athabasca River."
When Government starts restricting information it means they are hiding something.
My only guess is that some of the Canadian Federal scientists have discovered things about climate and the oil sands that the Canadian Government is terrified of releasing. It's obviously a conspiracy among the Canadian big shots.
The Canadian people should demand all of their resignations and get a new PM in there pronto before what's ever going on the we don't know about happens and destroys Canada and possibly the World!
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
I was ashamed too when Harper was elected to become the next PM. He keeps doing the same BS that George Bush did a few years ago so much and so often he is known as Mini-Bush for a reason.
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
They criticize the Chinese about freedom of the press and then do everything they can to prevent truth escaping into the wild in Canada.
Forget that, they ran on a platform of transparency. Hell, one of their primary talking points was that the Liberals were corrupt and secretive. And then we see this bullshit. Gotta love the hypocrisy...
This is a myth. Humans have known the earth to be round since at least the Greeks. Anyone who has ever been on a ship would have noticed the horizon and land seemingly disappearing over it.
The objections to Columbus was that he was bad at math and could not possibly get all the way to India with his supplies that way. He just got lucky that he ran into the Americas, otherwise he probably would have starved after running out of supplies.
Same shit here in the US. Bush ran a very secretive government, and pulled the "We don't have to justify it to you," card to the other two branches often. Obama promised to change that... And really hasn't. The states secrets thing is getting pulled out, few changes are being made, etc.
Politicians don't like it when their opponents have secrets, but they love it when they do.
This rule appears to apply only to scientists who directly work for a government agency as employees, though, not to professors who are funded by federal grant money, or even professors who teach at public universities.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
No story such as this would be complete without pointing out that the Minister of Science and Technology is a creationist.
To the Conservatives, "science" means "whatever we say". No wonder they want to control what actual pesky scientists say.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Yup, exactly this. The Harper administration has for the past few years been increasingly exerting control on how the public service disseminates information to the public. In the past (before 2007) a bureaucrat usually only needed the approval of their direct supervisor to respond to media inquiries, unless the topic was particularly sensitive. Now it the system of Message Event Proposals created in 2007, approval frequently needs to come directly from the Prime Minister's Office, even for totally routine and innocuous communications.
I think the biggest problem is, reports on the last ice age might offend the Conservative Party's core supporters - who know that there's no such thing as 13,000 years ago, and even if there was there'd be both dinosaurs and cavemen at the same time.
The U.S. did not lose the Vietnam War. We signed the Paris Peace Accords, withdrew, and then South Vietnam lost to North Vietnam.
The whole point of U.S. war in Vietnam was to prevent South Vietnam from being overrun by the commies. That objective was, ultimately, not achieved. That's what we call "losing a war".
Well, it is the ridiculous nature of the process and it is another example of the control freak we have as a PM. The example given in the article is a scientist who published a paper in Nature about the glacial flooding at the end of one of the ice age periods. The government did not allow him to be interviewed about the article until the deadlines had passed. The OK had to come virtually from the PM. We are not talking about anything controversial here: nothing that would be tied to present day issues. This pre-historic science and has nothing to do with contrarian views.
This will shock everyone, I know, but it is an example of the hypocrisy of the govt which came to power partly on the platform of being open. Sigh... meet the new boss same as the old boss.
Actually, if you listen to the comments of some DFO (Department of Fisheries and Oceans) scientists when asked about their thoughts on the (many years) raging 'controversy' over whether or not sea lice and other contaminants have been (drastically) affecting salmon runs their answers (or lack thereof) seem to make it pretty clear that they're not allowed to even think about the answers to those questions.
A few weeks ago, the Canadian Government decided that filling out 'long form' census questions would no longer be mandatory. They declared that Stats Canada scientists had assured them that this would not affect the quality of the data collected. The head scientist of Statistics Canada had to quit his job in order to counter the lies spoken by the Prime minister and his Cabinet.
Given the kind of control that they've taken over what government scientists can say, I have little question that some political hack is going to declare that submitting a paper to a scientific journal about a contentious issue is going to fall under this new policy.
Personally, I think that this is a flagrant violation of scientists' rights to free speech, but that's a matter for the courts to decide.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.