It took a solid year of outrage from Canadian researchers, the international science community and the public to force the Harper government to finally agree to transfer the world-renowned Experimental Lakes Area (ELA) to a non-profit organization.

And then the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans tried to take credit for today's announced signing of a crucial Memorandum of Understanding with the Winnipeg-based International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD).

“The Harper government was being hammered on this from every conceivable angle before they finally buckled,” said Diane Orihel, PhD student at University of Alberta and founder of the Coalition to Save ELA.

The ELA is 45 year old freshwater research facility in northern Ontario considered unique in the world. It was there that Canadian scientists discovered the dangers of acid rain as well as mercury and phosphorus pollution. Regulations that protect the health of the environment in Canada many countries are based on the work done at the ELA.

Claiming a need for austerity the Harper government slashed the budgets of Fisheries and Oceans and Environment Canada last year. The ELA cost the federal government just $2 million a year to operate but it was shuttered March 31st.

For comparison, it cost Canadians $1 million to ship Stephen Harper's armoured limo and SUV to India for a state visit last November.

“This transfer is only happening because independent scientists asked the IISD to try and convince the government to make it happen,” Orihel told DeSmog.

Only a few days ago scientists called on the Harper government to allow access to the ELA to continue world’s longest, whole-lake eutrophication experiment. That experiment is fully funded and crucial to understand the causes of economically devastating algal blooms in freshwater lakes such as Lake Erie she said.

The transfer is not a done deal, many issues remain outstanding however.

“It's a big step forward. The ELA does critically important science for Canada and the rest of the world,” Scott Vaughan, CEO and president of IISD, an internationally respected public policy research institute.

“Saving the ELA is the right thing to do,” Vaughan told DeSmog.

The best part of today's MOU is an agreement to allow scientists back into the ELA to continue their research for balance of the year. Present and future liability, staffing, remediation responsibilities and other legal matters still need to be negotiated. However Fisheries and Oceans are working to address a number of issues with the intent of turning over the ELA to IISD in good shape he said.

Finding $2 million to run the ELA is “a big challenge” for the non-profit IISD that has to fundraise for its core operations. “We didn't take this on lightly,” he acknowledged.

Freshwater and climate change is major part of IISD's work but the organization can't provide good policy advice without good science such as that provided by researchers at the ELA he said.

While Orihel is happy she'll be back at the ELA continuing her research this year, she is disappointed no new research programs will be permitted. One of those ready to go was designed to investigate the environmental impacts of nanosilver particles found in products like food containers, socks, shoe inserts, sports clothing and towels. Nanosilver particles are smaller than a virus and lab research has shown they can mutate fish embryos.

It says a lot about what is happening in Canada that in order to save an invaluable scientific resource it has to be taken out of the hands of government she said.

“A year ago I would never believed I would say I'm delighted the ELA will soon be freed from the shackles of our federal government.”

Image Credit: Diane Orihel via twitter @DianeOrihel.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Canada's crown jewel of environmental research may yet survive the Harper government. Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne announced yesterday the province would work with Winnipeg's International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) to keep the world-renowned Experimental Lakes Area open.

The 45 year old freshwater research facility in northern Ontario considered unique in the world was closed March 31st over protests from the scientific community and the public.

“Premier Wynne's announcement is most welcome but this is far, far from over,” said Diane Orihel, PhD student at University of Alberta and the founder of the Coalition to Save ELA.

“It's wonderful that IISD will lead but they don't have the $2 million to keep the ELA open. There will need to be a huge fundraising effort involving provincial governments, university and industry,” Orihel told DeSmog.

The investment will be more than worth it given the history.

Research done at the ELA warned the world about the dangers of acid rain as well as mercury and phosphorus pollution. Regulations that protect the health of the environment in Canada many countries are based on the work done at the ELA.

The United States just recently tightened regulations on mercury emissions coming from coal plants because of research at the ELA proved that if those emissions are reduced, mercury levels that make fish like trout risky to eat decline.

"We proved that if emissions are reduced mercury levels in fish decline fairly quickly," said Orihel who has spent 10 years at the ELA.

"That research couldn't have been done anywhere else."

The US paid for the mercury research and although Environment Canada has access to the data and long promised tighter regulations, it still has not acted Orihel said. 

The ELA is an outdoor lab with 58 lakes where researchers can experiment on an entire lake while comparing results to nearby lakes. This type of large-scale and decades long experimentation cannot be done anywhere else she said.

It costs $2 million a year to keep the ELA running. That's much less than 1% of the Department of Fisheries budget says Carol Kelly, a retired University of Manitoba ecologist who has done research there for more than 30 years.

An important experiment to determine the environmental impacts of nanosilver was fully funded and ready to go this year at the ELA. "We don't know what these tiny nanoparticles will do in environment and they're already in a lot of products," Kelly said in an interview.

Hundreds of products including food containers, socks, shoe inserts, sports clothing and towels are sold as ‘anti-bacterial’ or ‘odour controlling' now contain nanosilver particles that are smaller than a virus. Lab research has shown they can mutate fish embryos.

"We know nanosilver particles are getting into rivers and lakes but we don't know what they are doing to fish or other species," she said.

The ELA is the best place in the world to do this research. It makes no sense to close and government officials have never offered a credible reason for doing it said Kelly.

The only reason for the closure is to keep Canadians from knowing about the risks of new products like nano-silver or emissions of chemicals from the tar sands said Orihel.

"If public doesn't know then they won't fight for regulations to protect them."

A year ago most Canadians had never heard of the ELA. Now surveys show that 75% know about it and most, no matter what party they voted for, want the ELA to stay open she said.

“I hope the Harper government will co-operate and make this a quick and relatively painless transition.”

Image Credit: DFO.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

This is a guest post by writer, journalist and documentary filmmaker Michael Harris and was originally published on iPolitics.

These days, I am beginning to think that George Orwell was the greatest whistleblower of all time.

After all, it was Orwell who lifted the curtain on how the end of free thought was creeping across western democracies. In the end, stripped of the very language needed to form ideas, future citizens would be shuddering under a government colossus whose most efficient agency was the Thought Police.

The central premise of Orwell’s horror-scape dystopia, 1984, is that the facts are mutable.

Simple really: if there are no objective facts, there is no knowledge. That leaves it to a vastly empowered government to impose whatever ‘facts’ are required — and then to change them in the bat of an eye if necessary. Think of Stephen Harper on income trusts. Only the masters of Doublespeak can deny a flip-flop.

In 1984, dissent was not only impossible, it was a crime. The highest civic virtue in that secular hell? Orthodoxy through and through, orthodoxy for power and profit, orthodoxy all the way to absurdity and abject submission. Only the orthodox got real coffee and chocolate, and avoided a trip to Room 101.

Not for nothing were the only scientists in Oceania the ones who built new weapons, the last outlet for speculative and creative thinking in 1984.

But we are in Lawrence Martin’s Harperland, not yet 1984. Scientists in this country still pursue knowledge on its own terms, or at last try to. There was a good example of that this week. The attempt was mildly heroic, quaint and, in all likelihood, futile.

Scientist David Schindler wrote a letter to fight the good fight on behalf of pure research against the corporate lobby that goes by the name of the federal government these days. His was a reasoned plea to save the Experimental Lakes Area (ELA), which for all practical purposes ceased to be a federal facility on March 31.

Standing up for science has been a losing battle under this prime minister. Scientific facilities have been closed, grants reduced and, in many cases, funding completely removed.

Federal scientists who still have a job have been muzzled by their political masters. Stephen Harper’s favourite finger-puppet, John Baird, famously declared that the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy, for example, was vaporized not because it got things wrong, but because the Party didn’t like the advice it was giving. It preferred mutable facts.

In Harperland, there is no weed as noxious as independent facts. If possible, they are pulled up by the roots. Science is just another corporate enabler as far as the PM is concerned; if it’s not that, then it’s a potentially dangerous source of independent public information. But David Schindler is not as easy to silence or ignore.

After all, when someone sends you a picture of tumours, lesions and spinal deformities, the probability is that they are seriously unhappy about something.

Picture of deformed Walleye that accompanied Schindler's letter to Minister's Kent and Ashfield. 

When they include a letter pointing out that fish downriver from the tar sands development in Alberta are exhibiting mutations very similar to those of deformed marine life in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico after the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon disasters, they are sounding an alarm.

And when that same person advises you that in order to understand the impact of petroleum pollution on freshwater and the aquatic life it supports, you must ditch your plans to close the ELA, they are offering a very rare thing — a second chance to get it right.

What a pity David Schindler’s letter was addressed to a pair of palace eunuchs, Keith Ashfield and Peter Kent. He should have known that they answer all criticism of the PMO’s decisions about their departments with Big Brother arithmetic: two and two are five. Few decisions are made at the ministerial level anymore. The guy who cuts the PM’s hair at 24 Sussex has more influence than Harper’s ministers do.

Few decisions are made at the ministerial level anymore. The guy who cuts the PM’s hair at 24 Sussex has more influence than Harper ministers do.

But absolute power comes at a price. It is largely for that reason that Stephen Harper is sitting at a personal disapproval rating of 57 in the latest Forum poll done for the National Post. He has simply run out of omniscience. Like a drugstore blonde, his corporate roots are showing.

And while a few are still calling him the great leader of a major historical shift — including pollster laureates, a Harper-struck national columnist or two and the usual crowd of upwardly obsequious party hacks — even a few Tory MPs are now saying control is one thing, duct tape over the mouth is something else again. At least Brigette DePape got to hold up a sign.

In a nutshell, here is what David Schindler’s letter and photographs come down to. As the Killam Memorial Chair of Ecology at the University of Alberta, and a world-famous freshwater researcher, Schindler wants to identify the chemicals that are giving Albertans mutant fish in the Athabasca River.

Once the culprits in the “chemical soup” are known, then the engineering of the solutions can begin. Stephen Harper, world renowned aquarium-owner, has decided pink slips and bulldozers are a better answer to the ELA than dealing with its inconvenient science. What are a few misshapen fish compared to economic development?

It should be noted that Schindler’s public dissent has been preceded by a much broader action on the ground by former scientists at the ELA, including PhD student Diane Orihel. For five months last year, she told the country what would be lost if the ELA were closed. It seemed like a very poor way to shave $2 million a year from the federal deficit, when the PM was spending $10 million on panda bears.

This week, Orihel returned to the place where she and her husband had worked for ten years, leading a CBC camera crew into the doomed facility in order to leave of a record of what will be lost if the Harper government doesn’t agree to Schindler’s request to keep the ELA open. For those who saw the footage on the National, it was not the full story — for she had much more to say — but it was thanks to Orihel that any kind of record exists. Otherwise, it would have been down the Memory Hole for the ELA.

While Orihel was documenting what she could, the Council of Canadians briefly occupied the ELA, camping by Lake 468. As Mark Calzavara put it, his small band of protesters was making the point that the world-famous facility, which made the Canada/U.S. treaty on acid rain possible, “belongs to the people of Canada.”

According to a poll done for the Council, 60 per cent of Conservative voters oppose the decision to close the ELA.

With the polls indicating that any Liberal leader would be more popular than Stephen Harper (some say Justin Trudeau might even trounce him) the Tories have rolled out the familiar artillery: the ever reliable and equally deplorable attack ad. My colleague Lawrence Martin says it must be answered in kind or Trudeau will go the way of Dion and Ignatieff. He may well be right.

If so, the question is still there to be answered: Is fact by decree, and the two minutes of hate, any way to run a country?

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

This is a post by Michael Harris, originally published on iPolitics.

“Everything has a crack in it; that’s how the light gets in.” Leonard Cohen, take a bow.

Another crack has appeared in the Harper government’s surreptitious but merciless war to muzzle Canadian scientists — and just about everyone else.

The light entering through this particular crack shines on a disturbing fact. Canada, the only parliamentary democracy in the Commonwealth where a government has been found in contempt of Parliament, is now the only democracy in the world where a government bureaucrat can suppress scientific research.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada, where a reign of terror aimed at choking off internal leaks has been in full swing since the disastrous decision to close the Experimental Lakes Area (ELA), has issued a new policy on the publication of scientific papers.

Although there has always been a departmental policy on the publication of scholarly research, the 2013 version of the rules features some crucial differences.

Previous policies applied only to those papers prepared by DFO scientists. If government scientists teamed up with non-DFO scientists on a paper, it was merely “recommended” that DFO scientists adhere to the departmental publication policy.

The new policy applies to all submissions and DFO approval is required. Just to make sure scientists get the message, that part of the revised guidelines is printed in bold italics. Making things worse, the new policy does not lay out the criteria for giving thumbs-down to a publication.

How will it work? In a word, not the way it used to and not to the country’s benefit — assuming that intellectual freedom remains a core requirement of good science. In previous versions of DFO’s publication policy from 1997 and 2010, the word “copyright” doesn’t appear. In the new policy, the word shows up like flies at a picnic.

In fact, a footnote to the new policy clearly indicates that the divisional manager of DFO scientists must “sign off” on the copyright form, even after a manuscript has been accepted by a scientific journal. That gives the bureaucrat eleventh-hour powers to block a paper if DFO doesn’t want the information to be available to the scientific community or the public. One scientist familiar with that aspect of the new policy said: “Sounds like classic muzzling to me.”

Even if never exercised, the mere existence of this new power for DFO managers could suppress scientific ideas, hypotheses, data and conclusions that might raise serious objections to government policy.

Canadian government scientists have always rankled under policies that introduced politics into their profession. Scientists were muzzled in the 1990s by DFO managers over the creation of huge reservoirs in Northern Quebec. The federal government of the day didn’t want to stir up Quebec separatist sentiments. Accordingly, it discouraged its scientists from setting out the impact of the reservoir development from a scientific point of view.

The extension of the former publishing policy to papers authored by non-government scientists, and the assigning of final copyright approval to a government manager, will almost certainly discourage non-government scientists from collaborating with DFO scientists. The downside to that proposition is that it ultimately will have a negative impact on the quality of scientific advice provided to decision-makers and to Canadian society.

Jeff Hutchings, former chair of the Royal Society of Canada and Killam Professor in the faculty of science at Dalhousie University, sees the long shadow of government control — and even of self-censorship by scientists — lurking in the federal government’s new approach.

“The most disconcerting elements to the new policy are that they will apply to all scientific submissions, including those co-authored by non-DFO scientists, and that DFO managers have been given a hammer that they have not previously been able to wield: the withholding of copyright permission to allow for the publication of an article that has been externally peer-reviewed and accepted for publication by a scientific journal.”

Hutchings thinks that this could lead to government scientists, especially younger ones, thinking twice before undertaking certain projects that might displease their managers. Even if never exercised, the mere existence of this new power for DFO managers could suppress scientific ideas, hypotheses, data and conclusions that might raise serious objections to government policy.

The Harper government is well known for its policy-based approach to the facts rather than evidence-based decision making. The classic example was the disbanding of the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy because, as Harper cabinet minister John Baird explained at the time, the government didn’t like the advice it was getting.

Nor has the Harper government hesitated to shoehorn scientists into a communications policy that treats them like ministerial office staff.

Where else in the free world do government minders accompany scientists to learned conferences like last year’s international polar conference in Montreal, telling them what they can say and to whom?

Where else is a scientist like Kristi Miller, who makes a research breakthrough, forbidden to talk about it?

And where else on the planet would a government close down a unique and celebrated facility like the ELA to save $2 million a year, while blowing $25 million trying to breathe relevance into a 200 year-old war?

With Edmonton recently under an air-quality warning, tar sands toxins having been found in lakes distant from the project, and water levels dipping in the Great Lakes, it would seem that good science is more important now than ever. Instead, Canadians get bloviating flyweights like Environment Minister Peter Kent declaring that muzzling scientists is established practise.

Which, of course, it is — in Stephen Harper’s Canada, where the specialty is political science.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

MICHAEL HARRIS is an award-winning author, investigative journalist, and documentary filmmaker.

The Harper government knows and cares as much about science as it knows and cares about telling the truth.

That’s what the recent decision to close Canada’s world-renowned Experimental Lakes Area (ELA) tells anyone who is paying attention.

It also tells us that Environment Minister Peter Kent would have been a great witness at the Scopes Monkey Trial – for the prosecution. We shouldn’t bother jetting this guy to Earth Summits like Rio + 20 just to have him pick up the latest Fossil Award. Put the airfare into the Bev Oda VIP Transportation and Orange Juice Fund and ask the international organizers to mail in our Booby Prize.

I offer these observations after taking a close look at the decision by the federal government to shutter the ELA, yet another deconstruction and downgrading of government science in Canada.

Even Harper acolytes with a picture of Dear Leader in their wallets next to the kids should have a problem with this one. How many independent information bearers does this government have to cut down before even the Harper Moonies start worrying about the Gulag? What does it tell you about someone when they’re always telling other people to keep their mouths shut or else? Isn’t that what Edward G. Robinson does in gangster movies?

Let’s begin at the beginning, or should I say the end? On May 17th of this year, there was an emergency meeting called at the Freshwater Institute in Winnipeg. For those who have not been recently canned, these group terminations are as ritualistic as a firing squad. Before the killing shot, the boss reads from a prepared script. As soon as that script comes out, you can be pretty sure that the smell of toast in the room is your career going up in smoke.

At that meeting of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans’ Central and Arctic Division, the person reading the script to 17 hapless employees of the ELA was Michelle Wheatley. The news stories will tell you that she is the Regional Director of Science. What the news stories will not tell you is that she was crying as she broke the news.

With good reason. Her message was as bleak as the first road that was blazed into the then embryonic ELA in the winter of 1968: The installation would be shut down by March 2013; everyone would receive “affected” letters (they did within 24 hours); no new research could be started; and scientists had to get their equipment out of the lakes, all 58 of them – and the labs as soon as possible.

And then, of course, there was the cone of silence that the prime minister expects everyone to wear like a dunce cap after they are “streamlined”. All employees were explicitly warned not to speak with the media. Instead, media requests had to be forwarded to what was risibly referred to as DFO Communications. That is the branch plant of the Ministry of Truth in the PMO that casts the appropriate lights and shadows over the facts for the government and still manages to sleep well at night. You know, the Ignorance is Strength/Freedom is Slavery crowd.

How far has the government been prepared to go to smother the facts surrounding the ELA? For starters, DFO declined all requests from the media to speak with scientists. Being an equal lack-of-opportunity employer, DFO also turned down all requests from its scientists to speak about their work to Canadians. Remember, these are the same people who sent “minders” with scientists to a recent scientific conference in Montreal, lest they stray from the government line in public. I am beginning to suspect that the government line is based on believing that 10,000 years ago Brontosaurs were cropping grass in the back forty.

You will be comforted to know that DFO extended the ban on ELA information to federal MPs. The department turned down MP Bruce Hyer’s request to visit ELA with an ELA scientist. When an outraged university scientist conducting research there offered to take Hyer – who was elected as an NDP MP but now sits as an independent – on a tour of the facility, DFO threatened to cancel his research privileges. Any wonder that acclaimed international scientist Ragnar Elmgren said that this was the kind of thing you would expect from the Taliban, not the government of a western democracy?

Yes, the Harper government decided that the end has come for one of the great scientific enterprises in Canadian history. Consider the record.

Forty-four years ago, a natural freshwater laboratory was created out of a pristine lake system in northwestern Ontario. It was an epical experiment. Although it was about fresh water, not the universe, it was a scientific enterprise of the magnitude of the Hubble Telescope. No other fresh water research station in the world could do what the ELA could in a “whole-environment” research setting. As David Schindler himself put it about the kind of work done at the ELA “This needs to be done in a controlled setting, not in the Athabaska garbage can.”

And what a lot was done.

When DFO itself was amongst the host of visionaries who couldn’t see acid rain, and politicians like Ronald Reagan were publicly questioning the scientific basis for the need to take action, it was the ELA under Schindler that worked to provide the irrefutable evidence that lakes were dying. The work went on from 1976 to 2004. As a result of the findings of Canadian scientists, the EPA in the U.S. took action and new international treaties were established.

The “Metallicus” experiment established a link between atmospheric mercury deposits and mercury in fish. That is a vitally important connection to understand given that 80 percent of the lakes listed in the Guide to Eating Ontario Sport Fish are currently under mercury consumption advisories. ELA research on this deadly neurotoxin and endocrine disruptor has been used by the EPA to design new regulations to control the atmospheric emissions of mercury from coal-fired plants.

Very often, it was the immense scale of the ELA’s outdoor lab that made crucial scientific breakthroughs possible.

That was the case in understanding excessive algal growth in lakes. Small scale studies suggested that carbon was responsible. ELA whole-lake experiments corrected that erroneous conclusion and identified phosphorous as the principle culprit. As a result, governments around the world now restrict phosphorous inputs into lakes. Several countries have banned outright the use of phosphorous in detergents.

Similarly, standard laboratory studies suggested that acidity was directly toxic to lake trout at a pH level of 5; whole-lake experimentation discovered that pH is indirectly toxic to lake trout at -6, or at a rate that is ten times less acidic than previously believed. Why? Because their food source, shrimp and minnows, disappear at the lower levels and the trout starve.

From investigating the role of nitrogen in promoting blue-green algae blooms to the environmental impacts of freshwater aquaculture, from the impacts of hydro reservoir development on greenhouse gases and mercury cycling, to the effects of artificial estrogen on fish populations, ELA has been there. Its scientists have been in the vanguard of original research that has benefitted companies, this country, and the world time after time after time. You don’t get the First Stockholm Water Prize and the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering for goofing off.

So why, unless you had a fetish for killing off Canadian success stories, would the government decide to close the ELA? Why would it leave incomplete original work on the effect of Nano-silver on lakes, (Canada has no specific policies for managing nano-materials in the environment) on growth and survival of fish that escape into the wild from aquaculture facilities, or climate impacts on lakes and their watersheds? None of that work will now be completed. Some innocent souls went to Manitoba Conservative MP Joyce Bateman for the answer, since the Freshwater Institute is in her backyard.

Sadly, there was enough space behind her wide, partisan eyes to park a double-decker bus. Bateman didn’t even know the operational budget for the ELA, and wasn’t aware of its internationally acclaimed work on acid rain, reservoir studies, and nuclear contaminant pathways. Yet she asserted erroneously the facility was no longer productive, parroting lines no doubt given to her by Fisheries minister Keith Ashfield. As Diane Orihel, a PHD candidate in science and the Central Canada Leader for the Coalition to Save ELA put it after her own meeting with Bateman, “I was shocked by her complete and utter ignorance of science and what we do.”

The Opposition didn’t fare much better trying to get answers from Environment Minister Peter Kent. He tried to justify this attack on science by pretending that he just wanted to move our scientists further west “to examine acidification of lakes in western Canada.” Sounds reasonable, right? But the stuff in Kent’s political teleprompter is more head static from mission control. Like his colleague from Manitoba, Kent is operating light years beyond his competence. The research he is talking about has already largely been done and you might be able to guess where – at the ELA.

Most of what the government needs to know about acid rain in the oil sands area was discovered in the early work by David Schindler in Ontario, and reinforced by the work of those who followed him. It is interesting to note that that the original work was funded by the Alberta Oil Sands Environmental Research Program. AOSERP funded the research precisely because the water chemistry of boreal shield lakes in Northern Saskatchewan and Alberta was very similar to the ELA lakes. In other words, the research data collected in northwestern Ontario is a moveable feast. You don’t have to move the scientists.

Not only that, but the minister didn’t understand that earlier ELA research doesn’t need to be replicated at another facility and is actually ready to be applied in the oil sands. That’s because during Schindler’s tenure, the ELA established the biological and chemical thresholds where acidification becomes problematic. The fact that we can now conduct responsible monitoring in the oil sands is a direct result of invaluable research done long ago in northwestern Ontario. The lion’s share of what governments have to do now is bring in responsible monitoring at the oil sands based on ELA research, not reinvent the wheel.

But Minister Kent did get one thing right when he was giving non-answers about this insupportable decision to kill the ELA to the Opposition in the House of Commons early in June. Under questioning from Lac-Saint-Louis Liberal MP Francis Scarpaleggia, Kent crowed that unlike the previous Liberal government, the Harper government isn’t just paying lip service to the environment. But why not use his own ringing words: “We are getting things done.”

And they are. But only if you count gutting the Fisheries Act, killing the ELA, cutting the Institut Maurice-Lamontagne (the only francophone research centre at Fisheries and Oceans), eliminating the water resources strategy group at Environment Canada, and ending groundwater modeling. Even Tory Kool-Aid drinkers would admit that this is an odd way to come up with a national water strategy.

The unkindest cut of all. The federal government talks glibly about finding another operator for the ELA, perhaps a university. Just sell them the millions of dollars worth of upgraded facilities for a dollar. There is only one problem. The major source of funding to Canadian universities that might have supported the ELA has itself been cancelled via the moratorium on NSERC Major Resources Support Program.

The death sentence the government has pronounced on the ELA has nothing to do with the reasons stated. Contrary to claims by people like Kent and Ashfield, the work of the ELA is aligned with departmental priorities in both Fisheries and Environment.

If the main priorities of DFO, for example, are: fish populations, community productivity, habitat and population linkages, climate change and variability, and ecosystem management, all of these are studied at ELA.

It is false to say there is a similar facility in the world, let alone in northern Saskatchewan. There is only one ELA.

It is false to use cost savings as the rationale for the cut. Most of the research cost of the ELA are not paid for by government.

The costs of the installation, divided between EC and DFO according to a 2007 Memorandum of Understanding, are embarrassingly modest – $2 million annually, including approximately $650K for operating costs and the balance in salaries.

And here is a truly shameful number. How much do you think each of the four ELA/DFO scientists receives annually to cover their research expenses? Two thousand bucks. Bottom line. Canadians pay ten times more for the PM’s security detail than they do for this world class science facility. They paid ten times more for the celebration of the War of 1812. For the price of a single F-35, ELA’s operational budget could be financed for the next 150 years.

That’s why there’s not a chance that the Harper government will take David Schindler up on a very reasonable request. If you are going to wipe out 44 years of work, spark a scientific diaspora from the federal government, and create a white elephant out in the wilderness that will cost untold millions to “remediate”, do the intelligent thing and conduct an audit this summer to see if the facts support that course of action.

The government won’t do that because it is all about putting independent voices out of business, voices that if heard might persuade the public that Harper doesn’t necessarily know best. The PM believes in strategic communication – the amassing of friendly facts and pseudo facts and big fat lies that advance a chosen agenda. His approach to governance is like a bad PhD thesis. Science is about applying empirical tests in controlled situations with predictive validity aimed at finding the facts. The two schools are natural enemies, as antithetical as William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow.

Stephen Harper does not believe in funding any organization that might become a critic, even inadvertently, in pursuit of the facts. So he probably will look with favor on a suggestion by a Winnipeg-based money manager who has a plan to save the ELA.

Tim Burt is the chief executive officer of Cardinal Capital Management. He has written a letter to the heads of six oil companies asking that they assume the funding of the ELA previously provided by Ottawa. It turns out that he is also the riding association president for Winnipeg South Centre Conservative MP, one Joyce Bateman. Fortunately, Mr. Burt assures one and all that there is no political motive behind his suggestion.

Of course not, Tim. What could be political about handing over the funding for an independent scientific institution to the very private sector owners whose industries would be most affected by its investigations?

Now if only Suncor, Cenovus, and Imperial see the light.

Image Credit: PMO Image Gallery.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.