Muzzles off for Federal Scientists in Canada

In October 2015, Canadian voters elected a Liberal majority government, ousting the Conservative administration of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in power since 2006. Science and scientists have rarely been Canadian election issues. Under Harper, though, the muzzling of government scientists became known internationally. Now, as journalists gain renewed access to scientists, Canadians are gaining a glimpse behind a nearly decade-long curtain of tight communication control. Prior to Harper, journalists could contact Canadian federal scientists directly for interviews. Under Harper, that changed radically. The term muzzle in association with Canadian federal scientists first appeared in the media in 2007. Media use of this word was tracked by Carleton University journalism professor Kathryn O’Hara and Paul Dufour, principal at the consulting firm PaulicyWorks and adjunct professor with the Institute for Science, Society, and Policy at the University of Ottawa. Especially muzzled “were departments where scientists’ regulatory research, a mainstay of governmental science, could potentially impede natural resource development,” they describe in the 2014 book How Ottawa Spends, 2014–2015: The Harper Government— Good to Go? Such applied research included work at Environment Canada, Parks Canada, and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO). In 2008, Environment Canada scientists and staff were informed by their executive management that “just as we have ‘one department, one website,’ we should have ‘one department, one voice.’” This was leaked by a senior scientist to journalist Margaret Munro. At the time, Gregory Jack, acting director of Environment Canada’s ministerial and executive services, told Munro and Canwest media that the policy shift was to bring Environment Canada in line with other federal departments. He insisted on 1 February 2008 that “there is no change in the access in terms of scientists being able to talk.” But according to Stephen Woodley, a 32-year agency veteran and former chief ecosystems scientist of Parks Canada, he and others were not allowed to speak freely to the press, were not invited to meetings, or had budgets taken away. “It was very difficult to do science inside the federal government and in Parks Canada,” says Woodley, adding that difficulties increased after Harper’s 2011 reelection. Reporters often requested interviews with Woodley on “fairly innocuous” topics, he says. To gain permission to speak to the press, he and other scientists had to go through communications staff, guess which questions reporters might ask, and make up answers for approval. It was a process that “just became absurd,” he says. Art Osborne, then an Ontario region communications adviser with Natural Resources Canada, describes communications controls under Harper as a process that “choked everything almost to a dead stop.” Beyond the policy itself, he explains, was an engrained culture of inertia for fear of adverse reaction. “It was just safer to do nothing,” he says, so “this culture perpetuated the cumbersome policies and ponderous processes.” In 2011, Woodley was asked to speak on Canada’s national science radio show, CBC’s Quirks and Quarks. After getting approval for his answers to guessed questions, “I had to have a minder come and sit in the booth beside me when I did the interview,” says Woodley, an experience he found “very distasteful.” He left Parks Canada shortly afterwards for a job with the International Union for Conservation of Nature. “Morale was in the dumper,” he says. “It was a tough place.” Muzzling, the weakening of environmental laws, funding cuts, and announced closures of internationally renowned scientific facilities, such as the Experimental Lakes Area (ELA), sparked unprecedented advocacy. In 2012, hundreds participated in a scientist-led mock funeral on Ottawa’s Parliament Hill, dubbed the “Death of Evidence.” Organizers Katie Gibbs, a University of Ottawa doctoral student, and professor Scott Findlay would later establish the nonpartisan advocacy group Evidence for Democracy (E4D). Mike Rennie, now at Lakehead University, was part of an entire unit of DFO scientists forbidden to speak to media following the announced closure of the ELA in May 2012. In response, “people either didn’t talk or did so anonymously.” Rennie started writing an anonymous blog about the experience of being muzzled “because I just couldn’t take it anymore,” he says. The new Trudeau government campaigned with a promise to allow scientists to speak. Renewed communication freedoms were announced at the DFO and Environment Canada soon after the election. Other departments, such as Parks Canada, appear to be slow to change. With concern that there is little to stop the silencing of scientists from happening again, E4D and the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC) called, on 9 March 2016, for the right of scientists to speak to be included in their collective agreements. It is something PIPSC President Debi Daviau hopes will “prevent in future the kind of chill imposed by communications policies under the Harper government.”