A Reason to Write to One's MP
Here is what I find troubling, and I think if more Canadians knew about it, they would also be concerned. In Canada we feel that we are pretty much on top of things with our democracy and our government science departments in terms of their expertise and that they are doing the work that needs to be done to protect Canada's beautiful environments for us and future generations. These things are also supposed to be protected by laws such as the Species at Risk Act. However, the Harper government has been slowly and relatively silently cutting many key environmental programs and departments, especially those linked to climate change.
I didn't really know about this until I happened to chat with some people working in federal departments like Parks Canada and Environment Canada in the last year, and they told me in hushed and worried tones about the significant cuts which was hampering their ability to do the kind of work they felt this country needs. They didn't even want to talk about it at all, not even to me, which I found rather bizarre, and it took me a while to digest the emotional distress that I picked up from them. It was only later that I learned through alternate sources that, if it is found out that they are talking about this issue, that they could lose their jobs! That they were, in fact, under gag orders, placed on them by our government, to not talk about the cuts that they were under.
Well, this just didn't jive with my own notion of how our government works. It seemed to me like something out of a dystopian novel, that a government would put gag orders on civil servants who are supposed to be there working in a transparent service environment for the public good, paid by us, the tax payers. If anything, they should be expected to be given more of a platform than others, due to their expertise and positions to work for the public good, to discuss openly what is best for sustainability and Canadian citizens. It's not like civil servants work for a corporation or in covert ops. It still perplexes me that our government leaders should be able to impose gag orders on civil servants.
Should they be able to do this? When did we grant them this freedom to restrict our civil servants from informing us on what is in the best interests of our environment and future generations of Canadians?
I looked into it more and found that this has been going on for several years now and that some key programs, such as long-term critical environmental monitoring programs, that have been running for 25 years or more, have just stopped because their funding was cut instead of being renewed like it should have been. The thing is, when you cut these programs, and cut the ability of our great scientists to do the science the way they can, you dry up the data stream, and when you have no data, you can make no reasonable recommendations, and when you have no scientists monitoring something, and no relevant data with which to make reasonable decisions, then politicians can do what they want about it, because there isn't enough science to indicate otherwise.
This means that our rational process to make political decisions for our environment, based on rigorous science, is being eroded by this government, and even worse, so are some of the fundamental tenets of our democracy being fair and open and for the people. Our government should not be able to put gag orders on civil servant scientists like this. I'm shocked that this hasn't already been stopped. I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me that putting gag orders on civil servants like this should be illegal. It's the kind of thing one wouldn't be surprised to hear about in China or in a dictatorship, not Canada.
Anyhow, if you have read this far, thanks, and if you doubt this, look it up. For starters, here is a recent article in the the Guardian, which goes into one of the cases of this problem regarding ozone monitoring.
I strongly urge you to please write to your local MPs, as well as to the media and the federal government to alert them to this double problem--of cutting our ability to measure and maintain sustainability, and the limitations being placed on the freedom of speech of civil servants--and that it is a concern to Canadians and that we won't stand by quietly while this goes on.
Please feel free to pass this on.
By Maria Lavis
Maria has worked on various ecology-related projects in the private sector and for UBC, SFU, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Environment Canada and the Canadian Space Agency over the last six years. She has most recently focused on greenhouse gas management and ecosystem services. She is also a mother who enjoys yoga, blogging, hiking, sailing, baking macarons, and dabbling in writing children's literature.
Contact Maria: Twitter: @marialavis or visit her blog
