Canadian Bureacracy Can't Answer Simple Question: What's This Study With NASA? 164
Saint Aardvark writes "It seemed like a pretty simple question about a pretty cool topic: an Ottawa newspaper wanted to ask Canada's National Research Council about a joint study with NASA on tracking falling snow in Canada. Conventional radar can see where it's falling, but not the amount — so NASA, in collaboration with the NRC, Environment Canada and a few universities, arranged flights through falling snow to analyse readings with different instruments. But when they contacted the NRC to get the Canadian angle, "it took a small army of staffers— 11 of them by our count — to decide how to answer, and dozens of emails back and forth to circulate the Citizen's request, discuss its motivation, develop their response, and "massage" its text." No interview was given: "I am not convinced we need an interview. A few lines are fine. Please let me see them first," says one civil servant in the NRC emails obtained by the newspaper under the Access to Information act. By the time the NRC finally sorted out a boring, technical response, the newspaper had already called up a NASA scientist and got all the info they asked for; it took about 15 minutes."
Harper has destroyed our government.. (Score:5, Informative)
The Prime Ministers office is obsessed with US-style 'controlling the message'. No public statement may be made by anyone employed by the government without approval of a political officer. This has even recently been extended to the RCMP, and has affected publicly funded science for a long time. No information from our government is free of political meddling and spin designed to further the agenda of the Conservative party - which cares about only one thing: Being re-elected forever.
Sadly this seems to work and they are resisting scandals that would normally fall a government (eg giving false information to the public is typically certain death for a government in Canada). These people don't respect our democracy or the need for free information from the government, they don't deserve to run our country, but we are stuck with them for the foreseeable future, and it is unlikely any future government will dismantle all this information control infrastructure. :(
Par for the course (Score:5, Informative)
Canadian government bureaucracies are a nightmare. About seven years ago I was working on a project where we needed access to some government data under similar circumstances. It ended up being a lot quicker going through the US State Department to request the data from the US Army Corps of Engineers than it was to get it from the Canadian government.
Re:Scientists like to be precise (Score:5, Informative)
The current Harper government has been in the news quite a bit lately for muzzling scientists. The Harper government seems obsessed with controlling information coming from any government agency.
Can't wait until he is turfed out.
Re:Harper gov't has politicized the environment. (Score:5, Informative)
While Harper is originally from the Toronto area, he moved to Calgary, Alberta a long time ago and that is where he began his professional career and started into politics. He has an Alberta hard right political leaning. (That is Alberta, land of oil and tar sands.) And that is hard right as in Alberta's new 'Wild Rose' party that looks nearly set to beat the provincial conservative party in an election in the next few weeks. In Canada, normally even the conservatives are to the left of the Democrats in the U.S. Lately with Harper, they are approaching GW Bush republicans. The Wild Rose Party definitely is on a par with Bush, even if they may have to support things they find distasteful in order to get elected. Harper and the WRP share the same roots and ideology.
What they also share is the backing of the big oil companies, most of whose headquarters in Canada are located where else, in Alberta. Home of oil reserves, natural gas out the waazoo, and a very large chunk of the oil errr, tar sands (a large portion also falls under Saskatchewan's jurisdiction). A lot of the backing money for the conservative party also comes from the same source. And whereas the Liberal and NDP base is in the central/east and Quebec, the conservative base is in the west, primarily in Alberta. This is why Harper does everything he can to protect big oil and supports the anti-global warming faction as much as he can. He and his base are also fairly high on the Christian fundamentalist scale. That is, his base, not everyone who voted for him.
He has evidenced over the past number of years a strong anti science agenda. He has fired scientists for talking to the press and IIRC even for publishing papers his government doesn't like. He has barred scientists from the National Research Council climate research from attending a number of conferences including United Nations climate conferences. This would be equivalent to barring experts from NOAA or NASA weather experts from attending. He even managed to find a way to bar other members of the government, including opposition parties from attending. When they were caught out in some lie, his minister of the environment had the gall to tell the opposition parties that if they wanted to make a certain point, they should have attended the conference they were barred from going to.
Any time something threatens the oil sands projects, he mobilizes his forces like going to war. He wants to sell oil for his supporters at almost any cost. So why didn't he flip out more when the pipeline through the states didn't pan out? It's because it is ultimately not that big a deal for him or his benefactors. He has an 'out'. He was already in the process and since then has already passed legislation that will make ramming a pipeline to the west coast through B.C. a done deal. If U.S. politicians won't back a path to a market, he has a majority in the house in Canada, which makes him a defacto dictator for five years able to pass any laws he wants (and yes, when the Liberals were in majority we had glorious leader Chretien). Then he will sell China as much oil as they can buy. AFWIW, any law within reason. If any leader with a majority tried to force through legislation to give himself an extra longer term or something, the Queen or the Governor General can boot him out. Hasn't happened before but it's why we still give those other guys the power to do so... just in case. And at least when I was in the military, we swore allegiance to the Queen and Canada. The PM is not the CIC.
Given all this, it is not surprising that the people he has running the NRC now are doing a superb job running interference when any press... any press asks questions even remotely connected to the weather.
Why did Canadians elect them? Mainly because the Liberals and NDP were fighting over who could be the most left leaning party in the country. That left no middle ground. But the middle ground people didn't want to lean that far left so they had no choice but bite the bullet and vote for the ri
Who did they call at NASA? (Score:5, Informative)
Without knowing the chain they went through with NASA, it isn't really fair to compare the two experiences.
Let's ignore the fact that the journalist decided to call the NRC at the very last minute for a bit of extra information, and look at what happened in the communication internally at the NRC.
The NRC media arm was called, and unless the person at NRC in charge of that initial contact happens to know EXACTLY who to ask, there will invariably a flurry of back and forth communication internally, just as you see in the article.
When you look through the emails (btw, I hate it when you are given a data dump like that - it's close to impossible to figure out where one email ends and another begins), you find that the original call is on March 1st at 09:30
At 11:39 Manya Chadwick has an answer to the journalist, that needs to be signed off on.
That's after 2 hours and 9 minutes. Over email. In my book that's a fantastic turn-around time. Keep in mind that it is extremely unlikely that the involved parties are ignoring everything else on their plate.
Then at 14:03, Jonathan Ward has signed off on the text. That's 2 hours 24 minutes later. Again, for email, that's a fantastic turn-around time.
And at 15:10 Tom Spears is sent his initial answer. That's 6 hours, 12 minutes.
At 16:38 Tom Spears is given an extra update to the lines, pointing out that the NRC forgot to credit their partner CSA.
At 09:47 on March 2nd Tom Spears writes back: "Thanks, but when NRC won't speak to me I can't guarantee to write the story the way you want it.". (Seriously? Less than an hour after he gets his answer, they send a tiny update because THEY MADE A MISTAKE, and he decides to be snarky like that?)
The reporter didn't even bother to write back with a follow-up question or anything after he received the answer (only a "RECEIVED" message at 15:42). He didn't bother to ask if he could call someone or get a quick callback for anything.
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Let's go back to the question asked (technically no question is asked):
Now - since he's talking to Media Relations, he's obviously not going to be directly transferred to someone with intimate knowledge. That's just extremely unlikely to happen, unless (as I mentioned before) the person at NRC in charge of that initial contact happens to know EXACTLY who to ask.
The inquiry, as it's written, is more along the lines of "I'd just like to get a feel for NRC's involvement in the project" (a question that is answered in the mail he received) than "Why do you want to study snow?", as the journalist says the hoped-for interview would have asked.
My question is - what hoped-for interview? The initial inquiry was for information on NRC's involvement.
Now - considering that he received the initial answer at 15:10, there would have been PLENTY of time for him to spend five minutes to compose an email along the lines of:
But no. Aparently it is not in a journalist's scope of work to ask followup questions. Or at least not Mr. Tom Spears's type of journalism. I mean - imagine the extra work it would take him to add those extra 243 characters to his email. I mean - that's almost two entire Twitter messages! The horror.
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So - what about the NASA thing?
Note that "We phoned a NASA scie
Re:Bureacracy sucks but (Score:5, Informative)
It's worse than that.
The current government in Canada has threatened any scientist that talks to the media with censure. If they say anything that's "outside message", they lose their funding.
Too many links to list, here's a google search. [google.ca]
The message is "there are no environmental concerns in Canada."
Re:Bureacracy sucks but (Score:5, Informative)
Let them publish some real findings in a peer reviewed paper, then they can do what they like.
No, they can't. Read the links provided. One of them is for a Canadian scientist whose work was published in Nature (not some bullshit 'social-science' journal). Reporters were interested. Some of her findings were politically uncomfortable for the ruling party. The government muzzled her totally for over half a year. Left so long, the story cooled down, and the reporters were no longer interested.
I know this will be labeled as a troll. But honestly, fuck off with your socialist propaganda bullshit.
Well SOMEONE is trapped in the right-wing authoritarian mindset...
Re:Shipping Canada's oil to asia. (Score:4, Informative)
That's not oil, its high-pressure asphalt, "liquified" with added solvent, but the pipeline is designed for lower pressure oil, and they want to run it alongside the fastest-flowing river in British Columbia, since the Kalamazoo was too sluggish to promote a truly world-class catastrophe. Canada is aiming to take their rightful place in the headlines.
Re:Bureacracy sucks but (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a scientist who works for NRC. I'm not allowed to talk about my research to the media without permission and if the permission does come, it's never on time. I can't even give a scientific presentation without "managers" needing to read over it first. The media now knows this and is starting to look elsewhere for their scientific content.
The worst part about this whole story in the original post is that the communications department at NRC is funded (in part) by the research money that researchers bring in (government overhead is a big chunk of a research budget), yet clearly this is not serving the researchers well.