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Last night (June 6), Canadian Journalists for Free Expression hosted discussion with Gordon McBean at an event titled “Science in Peril: threats to free expression are threats to free science”.

McBean is a highly distinguished climatologist currently holding the position of chairman of the board of trustees of the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, among other responsibilities. He served as assistant deputy minister of Environment Canada in the 1990s.

Anna Maria Tremonti, CJFE board member and co-host of CBC Radio’s The Current, led the talk, explaining it would cover “cutbacks in government research and programs” and “the increasing inability of government scientists or scientists receiving government grants to speak to journalists, and by extension, to the public.”

“We are here to focus on and to learn about what Canadian scientists, both within government and outside, have characterized as muzzling,” she said. “And we are here to look at Canadian science in crisis. Research, responsibility, and the right to speak.”

The discussion in its entirety appears above. It begins after introductions, around the four-minute mark.