[Nehkara]

I am SO sick of Stephen Harper's war on science and information. I can't wait for them to be crushed in the next election.

The Federal government has dismissed over 2,000 scientists in the past 5 years.

In the past five years the federal government has dismissed more than 2,000 scientists, and hundreds of programs and world-renowned research facilities have lost their funding. Programs that monitored things such as smoke stack emissions, food inspections, oil spills, water quality and climate change have been drastically cut or shut down.

7 of 11 libraries for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to be closed; papers and books discarded

"I call it [closing libraries] Orwellian, because some might suspect that it's driven by a notion to exterminate all unpopular scientific findings that interfere with the government's economic objectives," Siddon told the CBC.

Health Canada library changes leave it difficult and expensive to access; scientists storing books in their basements

Health Canada scientists are so concerned about losing access to their research library that they're finding workarounds, with one squirrelling away journals and books in his basement for colleagues to consult, says a report obtained by CBC News.

The draft report from a consultant hired by the department warned it not to close its library, but the report was rejected as flawed and the advice went unheeded.

Before the main library closed, the inter-library loan functions were outsourced to a private company called Infotrieve, the consultant wrote in a report ordered by the department. The library's physical collection was moved to the National Science Library on the Ottawa campus of the National Research Council last year.

"Staff requests have dropped 90 per cent over in-house service levels prior to the outsource. This statistic has been heralded as a cost savings by senior HC [Health Canada] management," the report said.

"However, HC scientists have repeatedly said during the interview process that the decrease is because the information has become inaccessible — either it cannot arrive in due time, or it is unaffordable due to the fee structure in place."

"I look at it as an insidious plan to discourage people from using libraries," said Dr. Rudi Mueller, who left the department in 2012.

"If you want to justify closing a library, you make access difficult and then you say it is hardly used."

Widespread muzzling of federal scientists

The survey asked scientists whether they agreed with a number of statements about their ability to speak freely. It found:

- 37 per cent agreed that they had been prevented by public relations or management from responding to a question from the public or the media about their area of expertise in the past five years.

- 14 per cent agreed that they could speak freely and without constraints to the media about work they published in peer-reviewed journals.

- 10 per cent said they were allowed to speak freely and without constraints about the work they do at their department or agency.

The cost of scrapping the long-form census (we get less data and it costs more)

The total budget for 2006 Census was $567M and for the 2011 Census and NHS, it was $660M which included supplementary funding of $30M. Supplementary funding of $30 million was allocated to cover the costs associated with increased questionnaire production and mail-out for both the Census and the National Household Survey and increased field follow-up. $22 million of the supplementary funding was spent. Statistics Canada returned $8 million to Treasury Board, so $652 million was spent.

More articles:

Harper's war on science continues with a vengeance

The government’s war on science was well underway by the time of the omnibus budget bill — the long-form census long gone, a crime bill passed with little recourse to the data gathered by criminologists, scientists publishing papers on environmental topics already being muzzled — but the bill was its full-scale launch. It has proceeded apace since — and inspired the unprecedented scene of lab-coated scientists marching through the streets of Canadian cities in protest from Ottawa to Victoria.

So what is the nature of this war on science? Above all else, it is a sustained campaign to diminish the government’s role in evidence-based policy-making and environmental stewardship in three simple ways: reducing the capacity of the government to gather basic data about the status and health of the environment and Canadian society; shrinking or eliminating government agencies that monitor and analyze that evidence and respond to emergencies; and seizing control of the communications channels by which all of the above report their findings to the Canadian public.

2012: A bleak year for environmental policy

The budget also withdrew funding from the Experimental Lakes Area, the world’s leading freshwater research centre, which has done groundbreaking work on acid rain, household pollutants and much more.

Apparently the Department of Fisheries and Oceans can’t find the $2 million per year required to run the facility, though it will have to scare up the $50 million needed to remediate the lakes in the area upon the centre’s closing. It’s a bewildering decision that calls into question whether the government’s motivations are, as it claims, fiscal, or whether the Conservatives are instead trying to silence a source of inconvenient data.

Meanwhile, we needn’t wonder about the motivations behind the government’s scrapping of the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, a federally funded environmental watchdog created by the Mulroney government in 1988. When asked in Parliament how the government justified its decision to cut funding for the organization, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird implied it was because the Conservatives objected to the Round Table’s repeated endorsements of a carbon tax.

There is a lot more but it is pretty depressing digging up all of the articles so I will just say that I am hoping beyond hope that we get a different government next time that can undo some of the damage that has been done to Canada's science community.

Edit: I realize I'm not likely to get much support here... but people need to know this crap is happening.