Michael Harris is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He was awarded a Doctor of Laws for his “unceasing pursuit of justice for the less fortunate among us.” His eight books include Justice Denied, Unholy Orders, Rare ambition, Lament for an Ocean, and Con Game. His work has sparked four commissions of inquiry, and three of his books have been made into movies. He is currently working on a book about the Harper majority government to be published in the autumn of 2014 by Penguin Canada.

The people in white coats are coming for Stephen Harper.

On July 10, an as-yet-to-be-determined number of scientists, evolutionary biologists to be precise, will begin winding through the streets of downtown Ottawa on their way to a protest on Parliament Hill. Their official business will take place at the Canadian Society of Ecology and Evolution Conference. But the big story will be how they decide to spend their lunch break on the second last day of their convention.

The scientists who are willing to participate have been asked by protest organizers to wear their lab coats that day. They hope that will remind Canadians that scientists stand for the objective and rational pursuit of knowledge. You know, the opposite of Peter Kent. Not for nothing is the July 10th event called the Death-of-Evidence rally. That might yet be the epitaph written across the experiment in Republican politics in Canada otherwise known as the Harper government.

The people behind the march, students and professors from the universities of Ottawa, Waterloo and Queens, hope they will get a large number of the 2,500 scientific conventioneers to support them. Their marching banner cuts to the heart of the matter: “No science, no evidence, no truth, no democracy.”

I should add that there is currently a debate going on inside the organizing group over whether to drop the “no” from the various nouns in the slogan to stress the positive – a grievous communications mistake, but reflective of the optimistic and non-confrontational bent of scientists. Bless them in their innocence, they are swimming with the sharks now.

It is not surprising that the seat of the Harper government, Parliament Hill, has become a latter-day Bastille for Canadian scientists. The Tories have slashed, silenced, and stifled the scientific community like no other government before them. They are the champions of intellectual feudalism, purveyors of public policy without empirical foundation, gaolers of scientific free speech.

Just ask government scientists Kristina Miller or David Tarasick; good enough to be published in Nature and Science magazines, but unable to talk about their work to Canadian journalists because of government muzzles. There are still some worthies who call this a communications strategy – which I suppose could have equally been said about Pravda.

By offering only dilatory media access to climate scientists, the Harper government has managed to reduce climate-related news stories by 70 percent. Budget cuts and legislative changes comprise the rest of the boa-constrictor that has been applied to the free flow of scientific information. Harper also did away with the office of Science Advisor to the prime minister. Why would he need a Science Advisor with a minister of science and technology who believes that Genesis gives the lie to that overrated lizard lover Charlie Darwin?

Whether this event fizzles or becomes our le quatorze juillet depends on the resolve of the scientists and how effective Stephen Harper’s three main levers of control prove to be – fear, intimidation, and misinformation. Many people, from those outside his party like Michael Ignatieff and Stephane Dion, to those inside it like Bill Casey and Helena Guergis, have already experienced the knee-capping reserved for Harper opponents. They aren’t the only ones to have felt his bottomless vindictiveness.

Harper has punished NGOs, community groups, journalists, and civil servants for even subtle departures from the path of Dear Leader. How great is the fear this PM inspires? Despite hundreds of amendments to the infamous Bill C-38, not a single Tory MP voted for a single suggestion from the Opposition. That either says the legislation was conceived in a state of perfection, all seventy-plus pieces of it, or the Tory caucus knew it would be less painful to fall into a wood-chipper than to cross this PM on his legislative forced march through the new Harperian parliamentary process.

But sometimes even bullies overplay their hand. The last thing the Conservatives expected when they shuttered DFO’s Experimental Lake Area (ELA) in northwestern Ontario was for ordinary Canadians to take note – not only that, but to disapprove. But that’s exactly what happened.

According to a recent poll by Forum Research, a whopping 50 percent of Canadians disagreed with the decision to close down the world’s only whole-lake eco-system experimental facility that has made so many planet-improving discoveries. It was ELA, under the leadership of legendary freshwater scientist David Schindler, who persuaded governments to act on acid rain before it turned our lakes into lime juice.

And here is something else they didn’t expect. As architects of a top-down, authoritarian governance model, where the golden rule is “do as you’re told if you know what’s good for you”, they expected the DFO scientists to pack up their ELA labs without a peep and genuflect to Ottawa on their way out of the Kenora. It didn’t matter what kind of low-grade rhetoric was employed to announce the decision, as an excerpt from a “protected” letter sent out by DFO on May 17, 2012 shows.

In giving the reasons for the closure, David Burden, DFO’s Acting Regional Director-General for the Central and Arctic Region wrote to scientists at Winnipeg’s Freshwater Institute that the decision was “part of the government’s efforts to reduce the deficit, aimed to modernize government, to make it easier for Canadians to deal with government, and to right-size the costs of operations and program delivery.”

As reasons go, Burden’s letter had all the coherence of a Scrabble board knocked off the table towards the end of the game. What the blazes does “right-size” mean? How does firing scientists improve access to government? How does killing unique and original scientific research that costs a tenth as much as the PM’s security detail modernize government?

Whatever capacity Burden may have been speaking in, it certainly wasn’t as a scientist. He sounded more like a flack from the PMO’s spin central lobbying for a bigger desk.

DFO made another stab at implementing this abysmally stupid decision in a series of three conference calls arranged by David Gillis, who is the Director General of the Ecosystem Science Directorate. There was one call to university vice-presidents and the Friends of the Experimental Lake Area (FELA) on June 25th; another to internal DFO and Environment Canada scientific staff at ELA on June 27th; and a third later that same day to university-based external scientists who worked at the Kenora-based facility. These calls were by invitation only. Those who thought that by punching in the pass code, 3135785#, to participate in the call, they would understand more about why ELA was closed would be sorely disappointed.

The call to the universities and FELA was a board-of-trade, feel-good bull session designed to show that the government had a plan, even though it clearly didn’t. The VPs of five universities – Alberta, Manitoba, Waterloo, Trent and Lakehead were told of the closure but also informed of the government’s earnest desire to find a new operator for ELA. Their interest in finding that operator was so earnest, DFO was generously allowing ten months for a process that would take years if they were really serious about continuing ELA’s invaluable work. When the Lakehead representative asked about resources to run ELA, Gillis replied that neither DFO or EC would have either operations or staffing budgets for the legendary federal facility.

Then it was the turn of DFO personnel to get on the phone with Gillis. The cyanide capsule had already been dropped with government staff elsewhere, but the Director General offered the usual, and under the circumstances, ghastly protestations of appreciation in his email invitation to the conference call. Managers seem never to learn that talking about how valuable people are who have just been fired does not create a groundswell of credibility. Gillis’s management mission was to soften opposition to the closure announcement without having to explain the reasons, a tough task when you are speaking to a group of professionals whose lives are dedicated to finding out why things happen the way they do.

They didn’t find out. Niceties to one side, Gillis spent most of the hour laying down the law about having to accept the new reality and get on with it. There would be no federal funds to operate ELA in 2013; a search was on for a private operator who would be in a “better position” to do experiments based on ecosystem manipulation; if no operator could be found by April 1, 2013 then the ELA would be mothballed, or in the incomparable bureaucratese of the moment, transition into “cold lay-up”. Whatever phoenix rose from the ashes of ELA under a new operator, there would be no participation by DFO scientists. As for terminations, they would likely happen faster than the site closure.

One of the things Gillis talked about was how Ottawa was working closely with Manitoba on the attempt to find a new operator for ELA. But Jean Marc Prevost, the press secretary to Manitoba’s Minister of Conservation and Water Stewardship, Gord Mackintosh, offered a different view. Prevost, who believes it is “senseless” of the federal government to expose itself to widespread international criticism for closing a facility that cost so little to run, confirmed that his province was not invited to take part in the conference call. When a federal official finally did contact provincial staff after the fact, Prevost said that “no substantive proposals were presented.”

“Minister Mackintosh has consistently pressed the federal government not to end the invaluable, long-term, ongoing research at the Experimental Lakes Area.” In fact, Manitoba has asked Ottawa for a “deferral” on cutting ELA’s funds and a “vigorous” discussion amongst academic, scientific and government leaders.

Gillis pursued the same government line in the third and final call between DFO and the external and university scientists who worked at ELA. But this time, there were too many obvious questions that he simply couldn’t answer. How could the government claim that other freshwater facilities could do the work being done at ELA? It was, after all, a one of a kind installation. How could a new operator be found in a few months, particularly when there was no funding available from Ottawa and a huge financial liability facing any prospective private sector operator? Finally, what was DFO’s mandate? If it had changed, and that was why ELA was being closed, exactly what was the job of the federal department now? And if it hadn’t changed, which seemed to be what Gillis was saying, why would DFO ever make the decision to close ELA in the first place?

As Dr. Britt Hall of the University of Regina put it, “There was a heated discussion about how, if DFO’s mandate had not changed, then closing ELA doesn’t make sense. The justification that was given for closing ELA, that they are concentrating their research dollars elsewhere, seems very thin because when Mr. Gillis was asked to provide other projects that were doing similar research, he could not because there are none.”

A key suggestion made by Gillis during the call, that universities might be alternative operators of the facility, is vigorously disputed by another participant on the conference call, Dr. Carol Kelly, a former professor of microbiology at the University of Manitoba and a long-time researcher at ELA.

“The idea that ELA research is more suitable to universities is incorrect. This is because university funding is always short-term, whereas the whole ecosystem experiments were and are long-term, usually requiring a decade of work. This is because the lakes must be studied before the manipulation is done, during the manipulation, and then after as the lake recovers. So far, government has been the only institution with this type of long-term capability, by making use of a permanent facility and a permanent staff.”

Yes, it was the same DFO mandate except two things would now be missing: ELA and its work on contaminants in freshwater. Just the things that need studying given the pollution problems in the oil sands – provided, that is, you wanted the knowledge so that you could do something about it. Could that be why scientist Dave Schindler, who is currently working on these and related issues in the oil sands, said last April to a colleague that he wouldn’t be surprised if Stephen Harper closed down ELA? With the government in a lather to sell bitumen to anyone who will buy it, was Schindler feeling how unwelcome his work really was weeks before the axe fell on ELA?

There came a remarkable point in that final conference call where a number of scientists heard an unknown voice say, “DFO did not make this decision. This decision was made higher up than DFO.”

One scientist noted that an irritated Dave Gillis interjected that the purpose of the call was to implement the decision, not to question it. When another scientist asked about the unreasonable timelines for closing ELA, the Director General replied that if anyone wanted the decision reversed or changed, “you are talking to the wrong table.” The scientists were advised to follow the normal “democratic process” if they wanted to protest the decision, but that it was pointless to appeal to DFO. The department was obliged to carry out government decisions that had been made by “the federal family.”

The federal family? Was it unintended clarity at last? After all, in the federal family, who’s your daddy?

Postscript: When Environment Canada was contacted for this column, Rob Taylor, the Director of Communications for Environment Minister Peter Kent, confirmed that EC is re-allocating its resources away from ELA: “Recent research projects at the site have not produced the anticipated results. As a responsible management decision, EC is placing emphasis on the emerging scientific challenge of oil sands development. Our joint monitoring program with Alberta includes scientific activity on acid-sensitive lakes.”

Readers can reach the author at [email protected]. Click here to view other columns by Michael Harris.

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