Canadian Scientists Protest Political Sandbagging of Evidence-Based Policy 216
New submitter sandbagger writes "Stephen Harper and the Canadian government have made headlines several times for stifling opinions that dissent with their own. This also applies to respected, peer-reviewed science. Canadian scientists have chafed at being gagged and having evidence take a back seat when forming policy, so they're grabbing their slide rules and marching in protest. 'Hundreds of participants gathered in 17 cities for rallies on Monday. In Toronto some donned lab coats while in Vancouver protesters were seen wearing gags adorned with the Conservative Party logo – a reference to the alleged muzzling of federal scientists by political overseers. ... Dr. Gibbs and colleagues said they hoped the rallies would alert the public to scientists’ concerns that the federal government has shifted funding markedly toward commercially driven research at the expense of public-interest science. ... Dr. Gibbs said her group would consult with the Canadian research community and look to other countries in trying to craft recommended policies for science in government. In recent years explicit scientific integrity rules have been adopted by many U.S. federal departments and agencies, after accusations of censorship and politicization of science during the administration of former president George W. Bush. 'Canadian scientists are where American scientists were maybe a decade ago,' said Michael Halpern, a Washington, D.C.-based program manager with the Union of Concerned Scientists. 'They're trying to figure out how to protect themselves from a government that’s increasingly focused on message control over a more open discussion of the facts.'"
Gone (Score:4, Informative)
Re:So.... (Score:5, Informative)
So, imagine you have a lot of government scientists who do research in various fields.
Now imagine that the government has told them they can't attend conferences and discuss their research without a government minder being present to be sure what the scientists say is 'on message'.
And now imagine that being 'on message' is ideologically driven, and often divorced from evidence and facts -- but purely based on the beliefs of the government.
Basically they've told the scientists to STFU, and stop telling people things which contradict with what they're saying or risk being censured.
Re:Keep in mind ... (Score:4, Informative)
The scientists being muzzled are employees of various departments of the federal government. While several departments of the federal government give grants for scientific research, the scientists who receive those grants may be employed by other bodies. One example are universities. Universities are heavily funded by the government, but they are managed independently of the government. In that case, the scientists are not in the employment of the government so they are not under the same degree of control. (Of course the government can refuse to provide further grants to that scientist, but that is the limit of their control.)
At any rate, the whole point of my original post was that grant-funded research is not equivalent to outcome funded research.
Re:Sounds familiar... (Score:5, Informative)
Obama and the left gave banks most of their goodies a few years ago.
The $700 billion bailout through TARP was authorized by Bush, not Obama. (While the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act [wikipedia.org] was passed by a Democrat-controlled Congress, it was not a purely Democratic measure. In both houses, it received the support of the majority of congresscritters from both parties, and indeed needed support from both sides of the aisle to pass.)
Clinton deregulated the banks.
Well...
The Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act [wikipedia.org] (GLB) repealing part of Glass-Steagall was passed while Clinton was president, certainly. Of course, the original bill was introduced in both House and Senate by Republicans - who controlled both houses at the time - and supported by a majority of mostly-Republicans in the House, and exclusively by Republicans in the Senate. The final bill produced by the conference committee was passed by veto-proof margins in both House and Senate; Clinton couldn't actually have stopped it.
Left unsaid in your comment is the implicit suggestion that the subprime mortgage crisis was precipitated by GLB, or that GLB made the crisis worse. While GLB has a number of flaws - and I would not say that it represented good public policy - it is debatable whether or not the subprime mortgage crisis can fairly be laid at its feet. There are credible arguments made that even prior to GLB's deregulation there was nothing in law that prevented investment banks from merging, from investing in the risky instruments that helped precipitate the crisis, or from keeping their books in the ways they did to conceal the problem until everything came crashing down. Some respectable individuals have even whispered that GLB may have slightly softened the impact, as banks that merged investment and depository institutions actually performed better during the crisis than investment-only firms.
Funny how you forget all of that.
Funny the...interesting...way you choose to remember all of that.
You first. (Score:2, Informative)
The hell it isn't. Try Googling Dick Cheney and the Clean Water Act before you embarrass yourself. Whoops, too late.
Obama's energy policies are utterly indistinguishable from his Republican predecessor - "all of the above". Why do you think he appointed Ken Salazar? Sad thing for you wingers is that all the honest criticism of Obama comes from the left.