There is a brewing controversy swirling around longtime CBC commentator Rex Murphy and his relationship with Canada's oil industry.

As long time readers of DeSmog know, Murphy has been a vocal supporter of the oilsands industry and a booster of those who attack the scientific realities of climate change. (Here's a compilation of some of the articles we have written on Rex Murphy over the years).

Now questions are going unanswered by the CBC, and avoided altogether by Murphy himself, about a conflict between Murphy potentially being paid to speak at oilsands industry events and his role as a commentator at the CBC.

First to report on the potential conflict was Press Progress, after analysing 25 of Murphy's public speaking engagements.* The outlet found sponsors for Murphy's pro-oil public appearances included the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, Enbridge, TransCanada and Suncor among others. Longtime investigative journalist Andrew Mitrovica wrote on iPolitics that he was taken on a "disturbing odyssey into the CBC’s Byzantine world of subterfuge, duplicity and plain lunacy," as he tried to unravel Murphy's relationship with the CBC and the oilsands industry in Canada. 

The CBC stated that Murphy is not an employee of the public broadcast and instead has, as CBC's Editor in Chief Jennifer McGuire describes it, "a wonderful freelance relationship" with the public broadcaster.

According to McGuire, "as a freelancer, Rex has the ability to do other work. So yes, he writes opinion pieces for The National Post. And yes, he does speaking engagements." The only thing the CBC asks of Murphy is that his commentary "be rooted in fact and experience, not just opinion or knee jerk ideology. But taking a provocative stand is what we pay him to do."

Regardless of CBC's positioning, if it turns out that after all these years, Murphy has been taking money from the oil industry while at the same time attacking those who oppose oilsands development and boosting the industry in his role as a CBC commentator, it will be a big scandal.

For me it is the definition of "fact" that is at the heart of the matter here.

In the case of public policy debates, rather than something like hard science, facts are a very tricky thing.

One person's set of facts on say, whether the Alberta oilsands are good for the long-term prosperity of our country, are to a great extent driven by where that person sits on the issue. It is no coincidence that many of those in favour of further development of the oilsands are apt to quote positive facts and also just so happen to be those profiting the most — whether that be a worker in Fort McMurray making five times his regular wage, an oil company CEO or a Prime Minister who enjoys the political and election campaign support of the fossil fuel industry.

The same holds true for the environmental community, although there is rarely a financial motivation (trust me, I know first hand!). Depending on your worldview, one set of facts will seem more correct than another.

Knowing where someone sits financially and/or ideologically on an issue of public policy is important context when considering the set of facts that person bases their opinion on. It is for this very reason that we have election financing disclosure laws in Canada. It is also why in many scientific fields, researchers must disclose any funding they receive from industry for their work. 

The CBC expects Murphy's commentary to be "rooted in fact" and in turn the public has the same expectation. If it is the case that Murphy is being paid money by the same industry he publicly comments on, then this must be disclosed to the public, which can then be the judge of whether or not Murphy's set of facts sit right with them. 

When it really comes down to it, if Murphy and the CBC believe Murphy's commentary for all these years has been "rooted in fact and experience, not just opinion or knee jerk ideology" then what has Murphy got to hide?

As it stands now, with Murphy ducking the question and the CBC not demanding disclosure from Murphy, his relationship with the CBC is "wonderful" indeed — at least for him and the oil industry he may or may not be taking money from.

*An earlier version of this article stated iPolitics was the first to report on Murhpy's close ties with the oil industry.

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 Richard Kool, Associate Professor in the School of Environment and Sustainability at Royal Roads University in Victoria.

Back in the 1930s, the Soviet ruler Josef Stalin had a problem with genetics; as a result, geneticists were branded traitors ("Trotskyite agents of international fascism"), stripped of their positions at government laboratories and universities, sent to prison, or even executed. Soviet biological sciences were hindered for more than a generation. The story of the Soviet geneticists has a distant resonance to the story of what is happening to government-sponsored environmental science in Canada today.

Genetics, the science of inheritance, was developed in the late 19th and early 20th century by scientists such as Gregor Mendel and T.H. Morgan, who did careful experiments demonstrating, among other things, the presence of dominant and recessive genes, as well as examining how genes combine to produce a variety of traits in animals and plants. Unfortunately, in Stalin’s Soviet Union, there were a lot of things wrong with Mendelian genetics, including: Mendel was a Catholic priest (and thus stood against the atheistic Soviet regime), while Morgan was branded a capitalist (he was an American). Mendelian genetics didn’t fit the Soviet ideology.

In the 1930s, Soviet genetics fell under the sway of Trifim Lysenko, an agronomist who proposed a different grounding for genetics. Lysenko’s beliefs were that seed quality could be improved by challenging seeds with extremes of high humidity and low temperatures, and that these changes so produced would be inherited by the next generation of plants; indeed, he believed that new species of plants could be created through this process (much as the Soviet rulers believed that a new humanity could result from “challenge and struggle”). Instead of engaging in the necessarily long-term selection processes to produce the plant products that would be most valuable, Lysenko pushed Soviet plant science towards a method of crop improvement that led to crop failures and famine: genetic reality trumped Lysenkoist ideology.

The pursuit of scientific knowledge flourishes when scholars are free to pursue the best understandings they can come up with, knowing that others may come along afterwards and create more and better explanatory theories. Science can do what it does best when political systems encourage the freedom of exploration, and those systems are usually found in contexts of democratic governance.

Science, and scientists, do not always do well when states are run by rulers, especially rulers with strong authoritarian and ideological orientations that might be threatened by research findings. Rulers feel that they know what is right and what needs to be done in their domain, and see no need to compromise, to consult, to listen or to consider other opinions, all of which are essential elements of the toolkit of those who govern democratically. Rulers often see themselves as exceptional and exempt from the rules that they can impose on the ruled.

Mendelian genetics in Russia and those that practiced it were threats to the ruler’s ideology and they were removed from positions where they could do ‘harm’ to the State.

And now we have in Canada a situation where environmental scientists working for the government of Canada have been found to be doing research that is no longer in line with the ideology of our present rulers. Climate change scientists, eco-toxicologists, habitat specialists and more are not being lined up and shot as the geneticists were in Stalin’s time, but they are seeing their positions eliminated, their funding and other resources constrained, and their ability to communicate restricted.

The ghost of Trofim Lysenko stalks Canadian government science. Science that produces results that fit with the Harperian science doctrine of “utility to corporations and industry above all else” seem to get the resources. Those government scientists engaging in the exploration of the major global issues of our time but whose pursuits fall outside of Harperian ideology today are, either literally or metaphorically, being shown the door.

Image Credit: Zack Embree

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.

There are few Canadians who can claim to have their finger on the pulse of the country's politics like public opinion researcher Allan Gregg. Founder of Decima Research and The Strategic Council, Gregg is keenly aware of how Canadians feel about contemporary political life and how our political reality in a very real way shapes our social existence.

And what Gregg is concerned about expressing these days is his unshakeable belief that something has gone terribly awry in Canada, and that Canadians don't seem to care. 

Gregg says he's spent his life as a researcher, "dedicated to understanding the relationship between cause and effect." From that, he says, "I've come to a fairly singular belief: namely, that more than anything else, societal progress is advanced when enlightened public policy marshals our collective public resources towards a larger public good."

"Evidence, facts and reasons…form the sine qua non of not just good public policy but good government," he says. "And lately I have to tell you there have been some troubling trends that threaten that fundamental belief. It seems as though our government's use of evidence and facts as the basis of policy has been declining and in their place dogma, whim, and political expediency are on the rise."

"In government and through collective action we have the capacity to do both immense good but also the possibility of infinite harm to our community and each other depending on how collective action and government is used," he says. 

Gregg spoke these words in a recent speech he delivered to the Alberta Federation of Labour. 

Gregg's concerns first arose when the government needlessly cut the long form census back in 2010. Gregg asks, how can we make good public policy absent this information? As a professional pollster, Gregg says the loss of access to this data was "a little canary in the coalmine."

But as Canadians would see, these cuts were just the beginning of a new trend that would eventually see massive cuts to CBC, of science positions for Parks Canada, the elimination of the National Roundtable on Environment and the Economy, the First Nations Statistical Institute, the National Council on Welfare, the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Science. These were, as Gregg says in Orwellian terms, "vaporized," for a savings of a mere $7.5 million.

Gregg's list goes on as he catalogues the ongoing 'assualt on reason' Canada is currently experiencing. 

When reason ceases to be at play, says Gregg, "prejudice, fear, and indeed wishful thinking takes its place." Which should give cause for us all to consider ourselves defenders of reason.

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.