This post originally appeared on MikeDeSouza.com and is republished here with permission.

Weather forecasters at Environment Canada aren’t supposed to discuss climate change in public, says a Canadian government spokesman.

Environment Canada made the comments in response to e-mailed questions about its communications policy.

The department defended its policy by suggesting that Environment Canada meteorologists — among the most widely quoted group of government experts in media reports and broadcasts — weren’t qualified to answer questions about climate change.

“Environment Canada scientists speak to their area of expertise,” said spokesman Mark Johnson in an e-mail. “For example, our Weather Preparedness Meteorologists are experts in their field of severe weather and speak to this subject. Questions about climate change or long-term trends would be directed to a climatologist or other applicable authority.”

Environment Canada estimates that nearly half of all the calls it takes from journalists are related to the weather. Its meteorologists also offer a 24-hour media hotline that, unlike most government scientists, allows them to take calls directly from journalists, without seeking permission for granting an interview.

But the department’s communications protocol prevents the meteorologists from drawing links to changing climate patterns following extreme weather events such as severe flooding in southern Alberta or a massive wildfire in Northern Quebec in the summer of 2013.

Johnson said that all public servants must adhere to a government-wide communications protocol that was introduced in August 2006, a few months after Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative party was first elected to form a government. Johnson also said that Environment Canada hasn’t received any feedback about its restrictions on meteorologists or wasn’t aware about any concerns.

Meantime, the department has touted job satisfaction among its employees, by posting some of its own interviews with staff on its website.

New survey indicates scientists afraid of speaking out

In contrast, some recently released quotes from a union-sponsored survey by Environics Research show the opposite, instead demonstrating fears among scientists about speaking out.

“With meteorology we are in a somewhat unique position in that our availability to the media is relatively unrestricted,” one government employee told the survey. “We do have to be careful what we say and keep it to the weather however. I outright refuse to answer climate questions, it is an issue fraught with too many traps. Could be career limiting.”

The quote was among dozens of first-hand accounts from federal scientists who expressed frustration about what they described as political interference in research based on the ideological views of Prime Minister Harper’s government.

The quotes, released by the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, include references to “Orwellian” practices and descriptions of Canada as a “Banana Republic.” The union didn’t release the names of employees in order to protect their identities.

Many Canadian scientists from universities have alleged that the Harper government is muzzling public servants who do research on air pollution, water pollution or climate change that contradicts efforts to support growth in the oil and gas industry, which can contribute to these environmental problems.

Several cases of alleged muzzling have surfaced in recent years, including an internal Environment Canada analysis that found scientists felt muzzled and had observed an 80 per cent drop in media coverage of climate change issues, due to new restrictive communications policies introduced in 2007 that required scientists to obtain management approval before giving interviews about their research. But the government has denied it was trying to suppress scientific evidence.

Some of the employees quoted in the union survey slammed the Harper government for damaging the scientific credibility of their departments, including Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and Health Canada.

“I think it is unbelievable that an organization that used to be looked up to for its climate records and the like in the past is now laughed upon due to its lack of resources and quality control,” one scientist told the union.

Weather forecasters can play key role informing public

Catherine Potvin, a biologist and Canada Research Chair on Climate Change Mitigation and Tropical Forests at McGill University, said that all weather forecasters, including those in the media, could play a role in helping the public understand what’s happening with unusual weather patterns.

“I think it’s good if scientists speak about what they know about,” said Potvin in an interview, after delivering a presentation Monday at the “Genomes to Biomes” science conference in Montreal.

“I don’t necessarily agree (with) the government trying to shut down these very capable scientists from talking. It’s a loss of expertise for the general public.”

The quotes from government scientists were released in support of the union’s internal investigation into allegations of muzzling of federal scientists. Its survey found that 90 per cent of federal scientists and professionals felt they couldn’t speak freely in public about their work and that 24 per cent had been asked to exclude or alter information for non-scientific reasons.

The government, in response, has touted an OECD ranking that places Canada first among G7 countries for research and development in colleges, universities and other institutes. This ranking also showed that Canada had reduced the percentage of federal spending on government research and science in recent years, that it was below the OECD average and was proportionately spending less than half as much as the United States in terms of the size of overall economic output or GDP.

Potvin urged scientists at the Montreal conference to inform all politicians about the evidence to improve Canada’s climate change policies in the 2015 federal election.

“We have a responsibility to say (to all politicians) that they’re making a mistake by not listening to us, because all of the research and all of the evidence is pointing to that,” said Potvin, who also worked as a negotiator for Panama at international climate change negotiations. “I did my PhD on climate change in the 1980s and ever since then I’ve read all of the climate models…(and for) all of these impacts that were being predicted in 1985, we see them now.”

The union, the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, has estimated that the Canadian government is cutting about $2.6 billion and nearly 5,000 jobs from science-based departments between 2013 and 2016.

“I’m probably quitting. Harper wins": scientist

Among some of the other quotes released by the union:

– A scientist with 30 years of experience in government said that federal labs used to be well-equipped and funded, but are now often being run by economists without scientific expertise, who focus on industry needs: “The mood has changed dramatically, we don’t appear to be concerned with public good. Rather we must do what industry wants us to do. In addition travel is impossible and equipment is old and labs look like some that I’ve seen in the developing world.”

– A scientist said the Conservative government is ready to silence evidence when the “facts play against their economic agenda: Two examples: the environmental damage and pollution caused by the exploitation of the tar sands and the serious impact of chemical pollution on the health of the population living in and around Sarnia.”

– A scientist who works on environmental assessments of industrial projects — specializing in waste, water, and species at risk – said his or her role as an environmental steward was silenced: “We are tasked with work that we ethically do not agree with and must support. If we do not, they simply bring in project people who are non scientists who will write what senior management wants to hear. I am over worked, disrespected, undervalued, and I hate every day of my job where I used to love coming to work.”

– A scientist said he or she has given up on giving interviews and now refers journalists to NGOs for comment because he or she feels it’s too much of a burden to go through all the steps of the approval process for granting an interview — a process that lasts several days if not more than a week.

– A research scientist said management responds negatively to “potentially significant data” and asks him or her to downplay findings, while discouraging consultation with the academic world.

– Another scientist said the government is “very subtly manipulating scientific information.” One example is that the minister wouldn’t approve a publication and instead asks questions and provokes delays until that publication is outdated: “Since the current government came into office, the words ‘climate change’ started to disappear from the titles of divisions and subdivisions of Environment Canada.”

– Several scientists said they were giving up and leaving government, including one who said: “I’m probably quitting. Harper wins.”

Image: Weathergirl goes rogue via Deep Rogue Ram

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If Canada is to seriously confront its addiction to fossil fuels and fight climate change, we need to reframe the entire debate.

That's the message a group of protesters aimed to send when they occupied and disrupted a conference at Montreal's McGill University on Friday.

At 7:45 a.m., about 30 people entered the prestigious McGill Faculty Club where the second day of Petrocultures, a conference organized by the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada (MISC), was to take place. Instead, the conference was forced to start an hour and a half late. While most of the day's events still went ahead at the new location, the protesters saw the action — which was tied to a banner drop — as a success.

"Every slowdown of this kind of conference helps," said Mona Luxion, a McGill student and spokesperson for the occupiers, in an interview with DeSmog.

At first glance, the conference isn't an obvious target for environmental activists. While featuring several pro-oil speakers, including an oil company vice-president and the former head of the Oilsands Developers Group, the conference appeared to lean towards voices critical of fossil fuel extraction, including an Indigenous anti-oilsands activist, prominent environmentalists, and academics and artists critical of the fossil fuel industry.

But while the conference featured critics of the oilsands, a promotional video for the event featured co-chair Dr. Will Straw saying the goal of the conference was to cover all sides: "It would be very easy to have a conference on this subject that would bring together everybody who's on the same side: hard core environmentalists, anti-oil people, and so on. But we do want all sides to be heard," he said in the video produced by TV McGill.

It's this kind of false equivalency between the two sides of the fossil fuel debate that's dangerous, said Luxion. "Debate can be productive…But a debate that puts support for the tar sands as equal [to criticisms of the fossil fuel industry] isn't the debate we need to be having."

The negative impacts of the fossil fuel industry — from higher rates of cancers in First Nations communities living downstream from the oilsands, to the growing catastrophic impacts of climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions — are well documented, Luxion said.

Instead, the occupiers argue there is an urgent need to discuss how we end our dependency on fossil fuels, and how to stop the promotion of the fossil fuel industry.

Co-chair Dr. Will Straw told DeSmog he agrees not all sides of a debate are equal, and said McGill attempted to give more space to fossil fuel critics.

"We didn't look for a balanced conference. One side already has more access to the media," he said, referencing the oil and gas industry. He also stressed that by holding the conference on campus and reducing the entry fee (in the past, McGill Institue for the Study of Canada) conferences have been held at hotels with hefty $400 registration fees), there was a much broader student and community participation.

Even with greater participation, the conference's mandate to "discuss and debate the role of oil and energy in shaping social, cultural and political life in Canada at present and in the future" still served to reinforce the status quo, said Luxion.

The protesters voiced an additional concern that invited representatives from the environmental movement weren't challenging the status quo aggressively enough. 

In a written statement, the occupiers were specific in their concerns:

"To whom does Petrocultures offer a stage? Beyond outright promoters of the tar sands and fracking: a co-founder of ForestEthics, which advocates for 'responsible industry,' a co-founder of Équiterre, which urges 'responsible consumption,' and the president of the International Institute for Sustainable Development, which campaigns to achieve 'green growth.' The common thread uniting these speakers is a commitment to making moderate adjustments to life under capitalism, adjustments which serve to extend the lifespan of an inherently violent system without abolishing it."

Steven Guilbeault of Montreal-based Equiterre was invited to speak at the conference, on a panel with Tzeporah Berman of ForestEthics, and Sun News personality and oilsands proponent Ezra Levant.

While Guilbeault agreed the debate around fossil fuels is in need of being reframed, he feels the necessary discussions on how to combat climate change are happening in the environmental movement, and that Équiterre and its allies have seen successes.

"I often debate with myself and others on what we need to do to be more effective; how do we become more radical, more effective, more inclusive," he said. The debate is shifting, he argued, pointing to 50,000 people out last year for a march in Montreal against fossil fuels, and 300,000 coming out for Earth Day in 2012, at the height of the Quebec student strike.

But Luxion says the protesters want a stronger challenge of current economic frames: "Our concern specifically was that that the people who are proposed as opponents don't veer too far from capitalism…They aren't talking about decolonizaton or about changes to our economic model."

Also reached for comment, Levant, who contends that Canadian oil is more ethical than oil imported from countries like Saudi Arabia, agreed that the debate around oil in Canada needs to be framed differently, although to different ends.

"Right now the framing of it is: imperfect oilsands oil versus the fantasy fuel of the future that's perfect in every way (except it doesn't exist yet)," he wrote. "I'm trying to reframe the debate towards real-life choices: ethical oil from Canada versus conflict oil from OPEC."

The ethical oil argument, however, fails to address the problematic aspects of oil development in Canada, leaving the important questions unaddressed. Ethicaloil.org has deep ties to the oil and gas industry and the Conservative party.

Levant's presence at the conference became a lightening rod for criticism. Straw said if he was to redo the conference, he may not have invited the controversial pundit. Guilbeault said Levant's presence served to reduce the credibility of the event.

For Luxion and other occupiers, though, the mere presence of Levant wasn't what made the conference more problematic. Rather, it's that the discussion continues to reflect a status quo that places pro- and anti-fossil fuel positions on the same footing, a status quo which is also reflected prominently in mainstream media and Canadian politics.

"The fact that all the federal parties support fossil fuel extraction to a degree points to the fact the debate is about how to exploit oil and gas, and not whether or not we should," said Luxion.

* Correction Notice: This article originally stated that the Petrocultures Conference was forced to change venues. That was not the case.

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