Why Stephen Harper thinks he’s smarter than the experts

Experts who had already experienced the Harper government’s cold shoulder might not have been so surprised. McBean chairs a group called the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences. It was set up by the previous Liberal government in 2000 to fund research, much of it related to global warming. Given that pedigree, it’s no surprise the foundation wasn’t instantly embraced by the Tories when they won power in 2006. Still, McBean was taken aback by the thoroughness of his shunning by Harper’s first two environment ministers, Rona Ambrose and John Baird. “They absolutely and totally refused to ever meet with me,” he says. “Or have a telephone discussion. Or even acknowledge any piece of information I ever sent them.”

Jim Prentice, the Calgary MP named environment minister in the fall of 2008, cautiously reopened the lines of communication. Prentice has met twice with McBean, who says “at least there has been a dialogue.” But the government provided no new money to his foundation in its 2010 budget, which McBean described as “basically the nightmare scenario for scientists across the country.” Projects, from a study of shrinking British Columbia mountain glaciers to climate monitoring on Ellesmere Island in the Arctic, are in jeopardy unless Ottawa gives the foundation enough funding, likely tens of millions, to survive in next year’s budget.

If there’s a glimmer of hope for a thaw in the government’s icy relationship with climate scientists, criminologists report undiminished antagonism. “They have a very strange antipathy to science and to evidence-based policy-making,” says Neil Boyd, a criminology professor at B.C.’s Simon Fraser University. Boyd is among those who say the government ignored research by making mandatory minimum sentences the core of its tough-on-crime agenda. In fact, Justice Minister Rob Nicholson’s office admits studies are “inconclusive” on whether more prison time results in less crime. Nicholson stresses less measurable benefits, such as making sure “victims feel that justice has been rendered.”

Another sore point is the Conservatives’ staunch opposition to Vancouver’s pioneering safe-injection site for intravenous drug users. They want to shut down the facility, called Insite, but a B.C. court ruled it falls under the province’s jurisdiction over health. Ottawa has appealed that decision to the Supreme Court of Canada, which recently agreed to hear the case. B.C. Health Minister Kevin Falcon slammed Ottawa for refusing to drop the case in the face of “very widespread independent medical journal support” for Insite.

Assessing how researchers and policy analysts on the federal payroll feel about such outside criticisms is difficult. The government has tightened rules requiring them to get permission to talk to reporters. Outsiders who work with them report frustration, though. “I think it’s fair to say that a lot of people who work in Justice and Health are pretty horrified by the lack of respect for evidence-based policy,” Boyd says. In an extreme case, a bureaucrat can always quit, as Munir Sheikh, Statistics Canada’s chief statistician, did over the cancelling of the long-form census. Career-ending personal protests, though, are unlikely to drive change.

What’s needed, McBean says, is patient, authoritative advocacy. Unfortunately, he adds, Canada lacks a body like the U.S. National Academy of Sciences that reliably commands high-level attention.

Nor does science have a designated voice at the Canadian government’s pinnacle. Former prime minister Paul Martin established the position of national science adviser, but Harper eliminated the job in 2007. “It was,” McBean says, “a very strong indication of the lack of interest in having scientific input at the centre.” And it meant the Prime Minister’s Office went back to having no senior official comparable to a U.S. president’s science adviser, a prestigious White House post created in 1976.

Not surprisingly, the Conservatives deny they sell science short. Back in 2008, for example, after the prestigious British journal Nature slammed what it called Harper’s “manifest disregard for science,” Tories stressed how the PM’s axed science adviser had been replaced by a whole council of advisers to the industry minister, drawn from the top ranks of companies and universities. As well, on highly charged issues like climate and crime, experts can’t credibly claim to be dispassionately neutral on the political implications of their research. “It is easy,” observes Rainer Knopff, a political science professor at the University of Calgary with ties to Harper’s circle, “and intuitively attractive, to see ‘interest’ behind political actions and ‘disinterested reason’ behind ‘expert’ actions.” But even on the census, Knopff points out, “vested interests and bureaucrat inertia” are plausible reasons for at least some of this summer’s resistance to change.

The ambivalent signals Harper’s government sends about science and research, data and independent analysis haven’t noticeably cost him politically. At least, not until the census move blew up, unexpectedly uniting experts in unrelated fields around their devotion to reliable data. It would be even more unexpected if such a seemingly arcane debate sparked a broader one, around the most fundamental questions about the basis on which the government develops and justifies its policies.

Photo: Reuters