When the Harper government turned off the cash tap to the supposedly sacred Experimental Lakes Area project in northwestern Ontario, the loudest critics on the left were quick to point out that even Al Jazeera covered the story as if it had a whiff of ultra-conservative eco-terrorism.

It was totally over the top, but effective.

The ELA’s $2 million annual budget was chump change in a federal spending pot of billions but, if the federal government was going to pick at nits, the ELA was not a bad nit to pick.

Its virtue has been dramatically over-glorified.

If it were truly so vitally important as a “unique international research station,” why has no private or charitable environmental agency jumped at the chance of picking it up for a mere $1, an offer the Conservatives put on the table with a one-year deadline.

After all, what’s a buck these days?

If the annual budget to keep the project afloat was a comparatively paltry $2 million, where was the Suzuki Foundation, for example? For the mere price of a loonie, it could have picked up this 58-lake research facility with its 40-year record of coming up with “cutting edge findings on a myriad of ecological issues,” including phosphate and mercury pollution, acid rain and the aquatic effects of alleged climate changes.

There is even a modern field-station kitchen and dining hall, and comfortable accommodations for up to

50 researchers.

And all for only a buck. This would seem a steal.

Try to find a dollar store these days that still has items for sale for a dollar. It’s nigh impossible.

Yet no one jumped at the chance.

Instead, there was news in recent days that a bouquet of flowers had arrived at Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne’s office after she announced that her faltering Liberal government, the one that blew $500 million in taxpayers’ dollars to nix two eco-friendlier gas-fired power generation plants for purely political reasons, was going come up with the $2 million to give the ELA at least a reprieve from its impending federal death sentence.

“Thank you for your courageous work,” Green Party queen Elizabeth May wrote on the accompanying note. “Canada is so grateful!”

Grateful with an exclamation mark, no less.

Her gratitude, Canada’s gratitude, was obviously profound. What most fail to realize, however, is that the Experimental Lakes Area was more like a place for scientists to go to wreak havoc in the name of science, enjoy a week or two in a resort-like setting in a Lake of the Woods watershed, and do what would — and should — cause true environmentalists to seek legal action.

For almost four decades, these scientists have taken formerly pristine lakes and polluted the hell out of them — just to see what would happen.

What would happen, for example, if tonnes of phosphate-laden laundry detergent were dumped into the untainted ecosystem of a crystal-clear lake?

This, in fact, was done.

Well, it doesn’t take a PhD to know what the answer would be without having to first kill off a lake, just as it takes no scientist to know what would happen if you tossed a lit match into a house loaded to the brim with propane.

We already know the answer, so why blow up a house unless it’s just for the fun of it?

Or kill off a lake, and all the life within it?

In 1976, as another example of research-gone-mad, scientists took a small ELA lake and, in the first three years, added enough sulphuric acid to it that the result would supposedly replicate a 20-year exposure to acid rain.

Anyone surprised that those out-of-sight, out-of-mind indigenous trout shrivelled up from the effects of battery acid killing off their food supply?

Me neither, but try pulling off that little “experiment” in one of the lakes in upmarket Muskoka. The outrage would be epic.

By the way, whatever happened to acid rain, or the hole in the ozone caused by aerosol cans, and why are they no longer trending as fear factors?

Right.

They’ve all been taken over by wide-eyed debates on climate change and carbon taxes, all while David Suzuki sells virtual life preservers to save Santa’s reindeer from drowning.

It’s a funny old world.

Some 58 experimentally approved lakes for only a buck, yet no takers.

Perhaps Al Jazeera should do a follow-up.

— Bonokoski is Sun Media’s national editorial writer