Canadian Bureacracy Can't Answer Simple Question: What's This Study With NASA?

Saint Aardvark writes "It seemed like a pretty simple question about a pretty cool topic: an Ottawa newspaper wanted to ask Canada's National Research Council about a joint study with NASA on tracking falling snow in Canada. Conventional radar can see where it's falling, but not the amount — so NASA, in collaboration with the NRC, Environment Canada and a few universities, arranged flights through falling snow to analyse readings with different instruments. But when they contacted the NRC to get the Canadian angle, "it took a small army of staffers— 11 of them by our count — to decide how to answer, and dozens of emails back and forth to circulate the Citizen's request, discuss its motivation, develop their response, and "massage" its text." No interview was given: "I am not convinced we need an interview. A few lines are fine. Please let me see them first," says one civil servant in the NRC emails obtained by the newspaper under the Access to Information act. By the time the NRC finally sorted out a boring, technical response, the newspaper had already called up a NASA scientist and got all the info they asked for; it took about 15 minutes."

Comments

Re:Harper has destroyed our government..

[tlhIngan]

The US is just better at it. Harper controls everything, even information about falling snow. In theUS they know that you can let the scientists talk about snow. But not WMDs.

Harper is basically a climate change denier in a position of power. If snow studies indicate climate change, he'll have to suppress that sort of information. It's why he's cut budgets on Environment Canada, muzzled all government scientists (all requests to speak with one must go through a political officer first). Heck, there was one investigating some virus on salmon, and people were denied requests to talk to the scientist involved (it was interesting).

He's basically trying to sell off all the oil he can as quickly as possible - why, I don't know. The price of oil isn't going down, so it seems silly to sell so much now when selling it later can command much more money. (We aren't going to give up our oil habit that easily, but we'll transition to other fuels for our cars. And oil will become a hard to get speciality fuel - people want their old-timey muscle cars and the like).

Hell, he wants to ship Canada's oil to Asia. Why not keep it here, refine it here, and then make our gas prices cheap? Gas's $1.40 a litre (roughly $5.50/gal). And you want to sell our oil that could be made into gas locally to lower gas prices?

Hell, why not ship it eastward to the eastern refineries?