Party of One (21 page)

In addition to the critique, the triumvirate also offered to share their expertise with the federal government before the legislative plans were finalized. Anderson described the response from the Harper government as “a puerile put down.” The trio were not only ignored, they were ridiculed: in dismissing their advice, the then environment minister, Peter Kent, accused the former federal fisheries ministers of not having read the government’s bill. “That really did annoy me,” David Anderson told me. “I was expecting
something like ‘Interesting take, we’ll take a look at what you’ve said.’ Instead, we were insulted. It was demeaning of our intelligence and experience. We are not just a bunch of fuddy-duddies. And I can tell you that their attack line is not selling in BC.”

Another thing on offer from the Harper government that wasn’t selling was the suppression of significant studies by federal scientists. Jeff Hutchings was disgusted by the way in which researchers Kristina Miller and David Tarasick had been silenced. The prime minister’s own department, the Privy Council Office, had stopped Miller from being interviewed about a study she had done showing that a virus might be responsible for the alarming decline of sockeye salmon in British Columbia’s Fraser River.

Even though her study had been published in
Science
magazine, the DFO’s west coast chief of molecular genetics was forbidden to talk about it—possibly because it might cast an emerging industry in a bad light. Had fish farming produced the deadly virus that nearly wiped out the sockeye run in 2009? If so, Ottawa didn’t want Miller talking about it, any more than it was anxious to halt the growth of salmon farming, even though that had been recommended by BC Supreme Court Justice Bruce Cohen in his three-volume, $26-million report into the decline of the sockeye. A year after the completion of Justice Cohen’s federal inquiry, not a single major recommendation had been adopted by the Harper government to protect wild salmon.

Just as the PCO silenced Miller, Environment Canada had likewise forbidden climate scientist Tarasick from giving interviews about his work. He had been part of a team that had discovered a gigantic hole in the ozone layer over the Arctic. Tarasick later published a paper in
Nature
. Every federal scientist knew that the Harper government didn’t like reminders of its do-nothing policies on climate change. (The standing joke was: Why send environment minister Peter Kent to international climate conferences?
Just mail him the Fossil Award and save the airfare.) The prime minister had been so successful in keeping journalists out of the loop on the work of federal scientists that there had been a twothirds drop in stories dealing with global warming since Harper began restricting scientific information about climate change, wildlife, and the Arctic—all subjects with profound implications for resource development.

The government had gone so far as to send official “minders” with Canadian scientists attending a Polar Year Conference in Montreal in April 2012. The idea was to make sure Canadian federal scientists did not speak to any journalists without a set of eyes and ears from the “Politburo”—the name some scientists privately used to refer to their department’s communications operation. The derisive nickname was wickedly accurate. This is essentially how Environment Canada described its communications ideal in a 2007 media protocol that applied to all federal scientists—and which was tightened up even further by the Harper government in 2012: “Just as we have ‘one department, one website’ we should have ‘one department, one voice.’”

Jeff Hutchings had more reason than most for picking up on the Orwellian resonance in the government edict. Twenty years earlier, he had witnessed what happens when an organization decides to speak with one voice to sustain the unsustainable and its own reputation by smothering the facts. In 1992, Hutchings joined the federal fisheries department as a Natural Sciences and Research Council fellow just as the curtain rose on the greatest ecological disaster in Canadian history—the destruction of the Great Northern Cod stocks off Newfoundland.

A Conservative government, backed by a compliant science branch, in a
Yes Minister
³
department, had been instrumental in wiping out the third-largest biomass in the world. The department had failed to detect deadly flaws in the computer model it used for
setting cod quotas, not realizing it was killing far more fish than its annual mortality rates suggested. But there was an industry to sustain, votes to be jigged, and fish-plant operators to satisfy, so the hefty cod quotas kept coming from Ottawa—right to the day the trawls from deep-sea fishing companies like National Sea were winched in empty from what had once been the richest fishing grounds in the world.

Tragically, going back as far as 1986, scientific studies had been suggesting a disaster was brewing in the water. But the studies had not been widely shared among DFO scientists. As a fish biologist, Hutchings could find “no evidence” for the abundance of cod allegedly found in DFO surveys. He and a colleague, the late Ransom Myers, were bitterly attacked by senior DFO managers for questioning departmental stock assessments, quotas, and the selective use of scientific studies. But by the summer of 1992, the scurrilous attacks on Hutchings and Myers came to an abrupt halt. There was no more room for empty ego, for sucking up to politicians, for self-interested denial. The fish were gone.

It fell to the then fisheries minister, John Crosbie, to deliver the devastating news. There was only one place on earth to do it—his home province of Newfoundland. On a July day in St. John’s, I stood in a room in the Radisson Hotel while Crosbie formally closed a stock that had been fished consecutively for four hundred years by as many as sixty nations. Along with the closure, the minister announced a relief program for the thirty-one thousand fishermen who were instantly thrown out of work. You could hear the groans through the wall from the adjacent room. That’s where they put the overflow of fishermen who came in from around the bay that day to watch their fate unfold on closed-circuit TV.

The bad news struck Newfoundland like a bolt of lightning. For safety reasons, Crosbie’s staff wanted him to leave through the hotel kitchen when the event ended. Instead, the minister went
through the front door and parted the angry mob as he strode out. After all, he was Ches Crosbie’s son, and the family was not known for shying away from a battle. He found himself on the receiving end of an abusive blast from fiery Fisheries Union president Richard Cashin and catcalls from enraged fishermen. The bear-like Crosbie gave as good as he got. Despite the theatrics on all sides, a pall descended over Newfoundland with the realization that something sacred had been lost—perhaps forever.

The price to Canadian taxpayers of their politicians and bureaucrats manipulating science for political and commercial gain was dizzying: all told, nearly $4 billion was spent under The Atlantic Groundfish Strategy (TAGS), which forty thousand fishermen received—ten thousand more than federal bureaucrats had foreseen. To this day, the spawning biomass of the northern cod remains too small to support a commercial cod fishery. Politics had overridden science, with terrible consequences for all concerned.

The passion in Jeff Hutchings’s voice at the Death of Evidence rally was an echo of the sheer dimension of the cod collapse—an event that might very well have been avoided had available scientific data been acted on instead of suppressed, ignored, or misunderstood for seven, deadly years. The crowd pumped their signs up and down as Hutchings spoke. He criticized the Harper government for “weakening national fisheries and environmental legislation” and talked about how scientific advice had been “trivialized” by a government that thought so little of the profession that the PM had gotten rid of his science advisor in 2008.

As a fish biologist, Jeff Hutchings knew that the last official Stephen Harper should have dumped was his science advisor. Under the UN Fish Stocks Agreement, Canada is supposed to have 10 percent of its waters designated as “marine protected”; the actual number achieved thus far is 0.5 percent. Although Canada has sixty-one so-called “marine protected areas,” fishing is allowed
in sixty of them. And Canada’s ability to live up to its national and international obligations to protect species at risk was further compromised by Bill C-38, which removed key protective legislation. Hutchings thought it was inexcusable that Ottawa had eliminated the Experimental Lakes Area and government scientific research of “fundamental importance” to the health of the Canadian people and the environment. “After the ELA decision,” he said, “all Canadian scientists now have a tougher job. ELA led the way on issues like marine pollutants, including oil spills. Instead of celebrating our finest minds, we devalue science and call it an economizing measure.”

The crowd gasped when Hutchings came to the heart of his address. Why, he asked, were such harmful actions being taken against science and the country? His answer was that the Harper government had prioritized economic development “at any cost.” Hutchings offered proof. Quoting from a June 14, 2012, letter written by the then fisheries minister, Keith Ashfield, Hutchings said that the minister had complained that the existing Fisheries Act offered “few tools to authorize pollution,” but that new legislation in Bill C-38 would “establish new tools to authorize deposits of deleterious substances.” The crowd fell silent as Hutchings paused for maximum impact. “In other words, changes to the Fisheries Act will make it easier to authorize the pollution of Canada’s waters. . . . An iron curtain is being drawn by government between science and society. Closed curtains, especially those made of iron, make for very dark rooms.”

Indeed. In early February 2013 I had come into possession of documents showing how government intended to make those rooms even darker. The documents laid out a new publishing policy for DFO scientists. In the past, the department had only had a say in the publication of papers prepared by its own staff. Now, when government scientists teamed up with non-DFO
scientists on a joint paper, publishing approval had to be obtained from the DFO. Even after a manuscript had been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication by a scientific journal, a divisional manager would now sign off on the copyright—an official who had nothing to do with either the research or the science. The implication was clear. DFO managers had been given a previously unavailable hammer to wield: the withholding of copyright permission to block any publication they wanted to suppress that might compromise an existing departmental policy—without the obligation of ever explaining a rejection.

I published the story on February 7, 2013, in iPolitics, an online newspaper, and my editor received this brief note the same day from DFO communications officer Melanie Carkner: “The iPolitics story by Michael Harris . . . is untrue. There have been no changes to the Department’s publication policy.” The minister repeated the same declaration in the House of Commons. Then I published a second column, which included this excerpt from a DFO employee: “Here is the email I got from my division manager. . . . ‘Subject: New Publication Review Committee (PRC) Procedures. . . . This message is regarding the new Publication Review Committee procedures. . . .’” The email noted that the new policy would take effect on February 1, 2013.

This time there was no denial of the story—a good decision, as it turned out, since a DFO scientist posted departmental documents outlining the new policy, complete with an administrative chart showing the changes that would kick in after February 1. The communications Batmobile was quickly thrown into reverse. There had been changes to the policy, the minister confirmed, but they had been made unilaterally by departmental officials without his knowledge.

Back at the rally, it was the turn of the “grieving widow” mourning the death of evidence to have her say. I had known
Diane Orihel for a few months in her offstage, real life as a young aquatic scientist three months away from finishing her Ph.D., who was married to an ELA scientist. For ten years, the rugged camp between Kenora and Dryden had been their home in the summers. They had paddled its lakes, walked its woods, and had a small cabin on the site where the science was done. What Jeff Hutchings told me about Ph.D. candidates—that they spend fifteen years at university and do post-doctoral research because they love knowledge—is part of what Orihel is all about. Hutchings also said that for people engaged in the search, “Suppression snuffs the initiative out of you. There is the intimidation factor.”

As the Harper government would learn, you could pick an easier task than “suppressing the initiative” out of Diane Orihel. After the personally devastating news that the ELA was closing, every government scientist who worked there found themselves in a delicate position. All of them were hoping for new assignments, and everyone knew that openly criticizing the Harper government would reduce that possibility to near zero. So while people like her husband, Paul, had to remain prudently silent, hoping there would be a new assignment, Diane Orihel was free to speak.

Her remarkable journey, which would eventually be featured in
Nature
magazine, began the day after the closure was announced. Orihel purchased the domain name
www.saveela.org
and opened a bank account for the newly minted Coalition to Save ELA. She requested leave from her Ph.D. program and, against the advice of her academic advisor, the renowned David Schindler, she plunged into the public battle to save the storied facility. Just five days after the government dropped its bombshell, the Save ELA Parliamentary Petition was posted on the coalition’s website.

It would be hard to find someone less likely to become the public face of a movement. Orihel was more comfortable in a canoe than a conference room, more at ease diving to take test
samples from the bottom of a lake than debating weighty political issues under the glare of TV lights with glib talking heads. With no experience in the media, no journalistic training, and little help, Orihel, the brilliant winner of the Alexander Graham Bell Science Award, turned a little-known scientific gem, the ELA, into a household word. And she did it all in five months.