By Emily Chung
The party leaders vying to form the next Canadian government are being urged to “take off the muzzles” from federal scientists.
A group representing 500 science journalists and communicators across Canada sent an open letter, on April 25, to Conservative leader Stephen Harper, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, NDP leader Jack Layton and Green Party leader Elizabeth May documenting recent instances where they say federal scientists have been barred from talking about research funded by taxpayers.
“We urge you to free the scientists to speak,” the letter said. “Take off the muzzles and eliminate the script writers and allow scientists — they do have Ph.D.s after all — to speak for themselves.”
Kathryn O’Hara, (then) president of the association, said openness and transparency are issues that haven’t come up much in the election campaign, and her group felt it was important to ask about them.
The federal government spends billions each year on scientific research, and taxpayers must be able to examine the results, she said, otherwise, “how can you get a real sense of … value in money going toward science?”
The public also needs to be able to see whether government policy is based on evidence uncovered using taxpayer money, she added.
“In the last few years we’ve seen — under the Harper government, at least — a real concerted effort to keep controls on what the evidence is saying,” O’Hara said.
The letter included examples of cases where federal scientists were the lead authors of high-profile papers on salmon and climate change, but were not permitted to give interviews.
O’Hara added that when scientists can’t answer questions, it is difficult for journalists to do a good job covering their research, and the public could end up misinformed.
The letter noted that all political parties “repeatedly make promises to promote government openness and accountability ” and asked the party leaders to explain how they would guarantee freer channels of communication.
O’Hara said she hopes the federal leaders will acknowledge that there is a problem and that it is important to disseminate government science to the public.
The association held talks last year with senior bureaucrats in an effort to gain “timely access” to federal scientists who had published articles in journals or presented papers at conferences, O’Hara added, but afterward, “nothing changed substantially.”
As of Tuesday afternoon (April 26), O’Hara had not heard back from any of the party leaders about the letter.
However, Marc Garneau, Liberal candidate for Westmount-Ville-Marie and the Liberal critic for industry, told CBC News that things would change under a Liberal government for the majority of topics that don’t pose privacy or security risks.
“We would remove the gag order that’s been put on our scientists,” he said. “We believe that a healthy civil service should allow its scientists to speak as long as they don’t get into policy.”
As of late Tuesday afternoon, representatives of the Conservatives and the NDP had not responded to a request for comment.
“Canadian Science Writers Protest Government’s Muzzling of Scientists,” CBC News online, posted April 26, 2011.
Emily Chung is a science and technology writer for the CBC News.
Examples of restricted access to Canadian researchers
In January, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) muzzled B.C.-based scientist Kristina Miller. Her research, suggesting viral infections may be compromising the health of salmon, was published in the journal Science on Jan. 14. According to a media advisory sent by Science’s media office to hundreds of journalists around the world, Miller was available for interviews that could be arranged by DFO media officer Diane Lake. Journalists from such outlets as Time magazine and the Globe and Mail requested interviews with Miller. But in the end, DFO granted no interviews with Miller. When pressed for an explanation, DFO came up with the rather flimsy excuse that there might be a possible conflict of interest because Miller was to testify at the Cohen Commission into the collapse of salmon stocks in the Fraser River. Meanwhile, Miller’s co-author on the Science report, Scott Hinch, at the University of British Columbia, had no problem being interviewed by journalists even though he too was to testify at the Cohen Commission.
Feb. 17, the British journal Nature published a cover story on the human contribution to more-intense precipitation extremes by Seung-Ki Min, Xuebin Zhang, Francis W. Zwiers & Gabriele C. Hegerl. Though the lead author was Environment Canada (EC) researcher Min, it was Zwiers, formerly of Environment Canada and now at the University of Victoria, who participated in a telebriefing for journalists organized by Nature and did the bulk of the media interviews on this subject.
On April 5, the American Geophysical Union sent out an email alerting science journalists to newsworthy papers published in Geophysical Research Letters. Topping the list was a study by an Environment Canada team that concludes “dangerous” 2° Celsius warming in the global temperature may be unavoidable by 2100. The study warned that “it is unlikely that warming can be limited to the 2° C target agreed to in the 2009 Copenhagen Accord” since immediate reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions are required. Several of the co-authors were in their offices and available to give interviews, but they told reporters that requests for interviews had to go through Environment Canada’s media office in Ottawa. Interviews were not granted. The story — minus any expert comment from EC — appeared in The Vancouver Sun.
(source: Canadian Science Writers Association, www.sciencewriters.ca)
(NASW members can read the rest of the Summer 2011 ScienceWriters by logging into the members area.)
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