It’s strange for me to be celebrating the return of science to Canada. If those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, what about those who fail science?
My last high school science class was Chemistry 11, back in the ancient pre-internet era when kids still thought chemistry sets were cool. The only reason I survived was because my lab partner was a science wiz. I received a “C-” on the condition that I never darken the doors of a lab again. I wonder if our former Prime Minister, Steve Harper, had a similar experience in high school and that’s when he decided, “I’ll show them, I’ll show them all (insert maniacal “bwahaha” here).”
A few years ago I interviewed marine toxicology expert, Dr. Peter Ross, about our iconic west coast orcas and he shocked me with the news that they are, “the most contaminated marine mammals in the world” because, as apex predators, they’ve ingested everything we’ve ever dumped into the ocean. While that horrific information was sinking in, Ross hit me with a concept even more shocking. His position with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans was being terminated. Apparently, Canadians didn’t need to know if there was poison in our water.
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Vancouver’s AIDS researchers are among the global leaders in not just preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS, but creating a cure. “We could say what we wanted and did,” my former lab partner, Dr. Robert Hogg (now a Senior Research Scientist at the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS), told me. “The issue was that our national colleagues could not and were not allowed to create a national AIDS strategy that took into account harm reduction as well as a treatment response like treatment as prevention. Furthermore, wasn’t PHAC (Public Health Agency of Canada) supposed to be like the US CDC – independent of government and preventing us from having another SARS? We cannot continue to have politicians interfering with public health and stopping people from saying things they believe in. It is bad for science and bad for public health,” says Dr. Hogg. “It was lucky for Harper that there was no large outbreak and a lot of people did not die or get sick like in Walkerton.” The federal government is now working with the Centre on treatment as prevention.
Another victim of the ReformaTory War on Facts was the long form census. Cancelling the census was so politically indefensible that when the Liberals announced they were bringing it back, Tony Clement, the industry minister who killed it, didn’t even protest the move. Clement’s passionate defense of his destruction of our national database and years of irreplaceable information basically boiled down to, “oops.”