Authors: Michael Harris
Over that period of time, and often spending her own savings, she recruited an astonishing number of supporters to her cause— top scientists from fifty-eight countries; municipal leaders and citizens in Kenora; the former head of Manitoba Hydro; provincial premiers; federal politicians, including Opposition leader Thomas Mulcair (she buttonholed the NDP boss while he was out jogging in Ottawa and she was waiting for a bus); and environmental activists such as Maude Barlow and Elizabeth May. She even caught the ear of Canada’s keenest social commentator posing as a comic, Rick Mercer. “My Canada includes weird scientists who are devoted to keeping our water clean,” he quipped on his popular broadcast.
Orihel gave speeches in places big and small, never knowing if anyone would show up. She appeared tirelessly on national television, penned editorials in major newspapers, and wrote open letters to the prime minister. She never got the meeting with Stephen Harper that she repeatedly requested. Nor did Kenora MP Greg Rickford agree to publicly debate her. But despite the official wall of opposition to her cause, Orihel succeeded in making the integrity and importance of science a major national issue that the Harper government and all opposition parties will have to deal with in 2015. And as the Alberta election had proven just a month before the Death of Evidence rally, science could be a political giant-killer. When asked to explain the unexpected loss suffered by Danielle Smith and the Wildrose Party, former Alberta premier Ed Stelmach said it was the leader’s rejection of the science around climate change.
At the July rally, Orihel began her address slowly. Using a literary conceit, she spoke of the ELA as a child. Born in the 1960s during a decade of hope, it was the offspring of a forwardlooking government that recognized that science-based evidence was essential to solving society’s problems. As a one-year-old, the facility’s first mission was to save a dying Lake Erie. At age eight, the ELA discovered that acid rain was killing the base of aquatic food-webs, causing fish to die of starvation. As a young adult, the research facility helped hydroelectric utilities design more eco-friendly reservoirs. Next came the discovery that hormones in sewage were “feminizing” male fish. And now, Oriel gravely declared, in full maturity, with desperately important work to be done on climate change, on oil spills, and on nanoparticles in freshwater, the Harper government was condemning the ELA to an early death. The tall, slow-speaking woman from Winnipeg delivered her final line in a firm voice full of emotion: “We mourn the blindfold of ignorance imposed upon our once great country.”
There was no one present at the rally from the PMO, the DFO, Environment Canada, or Science and Technology to challenge a single word that Orihel, or any of the other speakers, said. Where, everyone wondered, was the Harper government? Faced with Orihel’s withering campaign, and polls that showed Canadians overwhelmingly in favour of keeping the ELA open, Ottawa was informally putting the word out that if the facility wanted to find a new operator, the protesting had better stop. Stephen Harper was playing his favourite political role as the Great Divider.
At a 2012 meeting of senior ELA scientists and government representatives in Winnipeg, a number of people in the room made the observation that the “sensitive negotiations” to keep the ELA open were being hampered by the constant criticism of the government’s record on the science file. One of the people present was Tim Burt,
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a Winnipeg-based money manager and the riding
president of Joyce Bateman, the Conservative MP for Winnipeg South Centre. Claiming that there was no political motivation behind his actions, Burt wrote to the six major developers of the Alberta tar sands—including Suncor, Cenovus, and Imperial, and asked them to bankroll the ELA. For those scientists who wanted to keep the ELA open at all costs, the suggestion looked like a lifeline. Some jumped at it—or at least didn’t dismiss it out of hand. Scientists, they rationalized, should deal with science, not politics. It was wrong to take on the government, wrong to go to the media, wrong to conduct an abrasive, no-win war with Stephen Harper. The wiser course was compromise, and private money from the oil industry was better than no money at all, some argued.
In the special myopia of panic-stricken self-interest, these scientists did not care to talk about the elephant in the room: if Big Oil, or any other private group, bankrolled the ELA, who would decide the science that was undertaken, and who would own the studies produced? If scientists at a privately operated ELA were to discover that the chemicals creating mutant fish in the Athabaska River come from tar sands sites, would the oil companies make that information public?
In the wake of that meeting, Diane Orihel was eventually asked to “go silent” on her indefatigable campaign to ensure that freshwater research was conducted by the federal government in the public’s interest. The request came from people she greatly respected and who were long-time friends. Exhausted by her exertions on behalf of the ELA, and emotionally drained by the sniping and bitterness of former colleagues and mentors, she resigned her post at Save ELA in early December 2012 to focus on her Ph.D.
Diane Orihel may not have persuaded Stephen Harper to keep the ELA afloat, but she and her colleagues caught the eye of the Ontario and Manitoba governments. With some funding from
both, the facility was saved from being shuttered. Under the auspices of the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), three scaled-back, whole-ecosystem experiments would be conducted at the ELA during the 2014 field season.
But even with a leader as accomplished as Scott Vaughan, Canada’s former commissioner of the environment and sustainable development, the IISD faces tough negotiations to maintain its independence in the world of privately funded research the ELA now faces. In Orihel’s opinion, life at the new ELA will be challenging and difficult without access to federal grants to pay for experiments. As she wrote in
The Globe and Mail
on April 1, 2014, “The Harper government has decided that its environmental policies no longer require the guidance of science, indeed all the signs are that science is unwelcome.”
Prime Minister Harper tried to take credit for keeping the doors of the ELA open a crack, at the same time as his government firmly shut it on federal funding. The divisions in the scientific community about scientific activism and advocacy are open and bitter in the wake of all that has happened. I wrote about how the PM had thrown the apple of discord into the scientific community and noted that many scientists who had once advocated standing up for science were now recommending strategic silence. One of the comments I received to that piece came from Thomas Duck, an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Atmospheric Science at Dalhousie University:
The silence you describe in your article is not limited to the ELA. It is a huge problem across science. Most everyone I know is trying to keep their heads down and not get caught up in this war. Most try to see if there is some way they can work within the system. Most have no idea what is really going on here—that science in Canada is in a fight for its very life.
Democracy too, for that matter. Those of us at the universities who are willing to speak out—the vanishingly few of us—are putting our careers at very real risk in the process.
Fear of speaking out? Careers at risk? Both the minister of the environment and the minister of natural resources unconvinced by climate change science? Canada was becoming the unrecognizable place that Stephen Harper had once talked about.
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MELTDOWN
L
ooking across the table in my Ottawa apartment at Linda Keen, I realize that years after she became front-page news, what happened to her then is even more important now than it was in 2008.
At the time, Keen’s case, an egregious violation of the independence of the head of an administrative tribunal, looked like an aberration. It wasn’t. The former ranch-girl from Alberta was actually the first senior public servant whose personal experience showed what Stephen Harper really thought of evidence-based decision making, or any form of opposition.
Since those days, the Harper government has attacked, and in some cases destroyed, a number of other senior public servants— Kevin Page, Munir Sheikh, Marc Mayrand, Peter Tinsley, Richard Colvin, and even Sheila Fraser, to name a few. These people were smeared or pushed out not for incompetence or improprieties, but simply for standing fast. They wanted to do their duty and Stephen Harper wanted them to do what they were told. Harper’s new normal was submit or be crushed—something
arm’s-length officers of parliament and heads of tribunals had never seen before.
Not everyone has the spittle to stand up to the prime minister of Canada, especially a PM with a reputation as an authoritarian bully. It is important to note that Keen’s battle with the government was not a matter of defiance but a fierce determination to carry out her duties under the act that she was legally obliged to administer.
Stephen Harper’s recently well-documented war on science began with an incremental war on Keen that eventually became known as the “Slaughter on Slater”—the street in Ottawa housing Canada’s nuclear regulator. His target, who took a year to subdue, could not have been more unlikely. By the time Linda Keen became president of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) on January 1, 2001, she was a veteran of fourteen years in the Public Service of Canada. Holding degrees in both chemistry and interdepartmental agricultural sciences, she began her career at Agriculture Canada. From there, Keen moved to Industry Canada before becoming senior assistant deputy minister in Natural Resources Canada. Formally in charge of Minerals and Metals, Linda Keen was the administrative face of government to the mining industry.
The talented manager caught the eye of the Privy Council Office as one of the senior science leaders in the federal public service. Keen participated in the clerk of the Privy Council’s committees on assistant deputy minister leadership and risk management. She had no background in politics and no political affiliation, and was selected to head up the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission after winning a competition run by the PCO.
Her new desk was big and messy. Linda Keen found herself watching over an industry that was a shadow of its former self. In 2000, a lot of bureaucrats thought Atomic Energy Canada Ltd.
(AECL) was a dying industry. Its decline was scarcely believable. In the post-war period, AECL created a world-class nuclear research facility. Its two reactors at Chalk River produced radioisotopes for the medical industry, and its engineers developed the CANDU brand of nuclear reactors.
In those heady days, the nuclear regulator was the Atomic Energy Control Board (AECB). But the AECB had what Keen described as an “overly cozy” relationship with AECL, acting more as a partner than a regulator. For the industry it was an ideal set-up, one that it had gotten used to and wouldn’t give up without a fight.
In the 1980s, AECL enjoyed major success, selling CANDU reactors both at home and abroad. Its overseas customers included China, Romania, and South Korea. Then the federal Crown corporation “got behind the innovation curve.” In the nuclear industry, Keen explained to me, a country is either an innovator or an adopter. Through mismanagement and under-funding of research, Canada went from innovator to adopter. Despite work on several new reactor designs over the years, including the CANDU 9 and the ACR 700 and 1000, AECL made no sales. It became a money pit, gobbling up tax dollars without much prospect of returning to the glory days.
The one bright spot was the production of medical isotopes, which accounted for half of the world’s supply. But that division had been privatized under the Mulroney government in 1988. The isotope division got a new name—Nordion International Inc.— and was moved into the Canadian Development Investment Corporation. This was not the best of deals for taxpayers. The federal government gave the private company a supply of isotopes at bargain-basement prices, guaranteeing the arrangement for twenty-two years. The public still owned and operated the reactors and extracted the raw isotopes, but the private company,
MDS Health Group, processed, sold and distributed the finished product—and reaped the profits. In 1991, MDS formally acquired Nordion.
With not much but promises coming from AECL on the reactor side, something had to give. It finally did in 2000. After fifty years of the Atomic Energy Control Board acting as Canada’s regulator of the nuclear industry, the Chrétien government decided it was time to shake things up. The then natural resources minister, Anne McLellan, updated the regulatory legislation with the Canadian Nuclear Safety Control Act (NSCA). The AECB received a new name: the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC). The legislation was aimed at developing a more independent nuclear regulator and placing greater emphasis on the protection of the environment and people through nuclear safeguards.
Linda Keen was well aware that the nuclear industry had grown accustomed to near-automatic support from Canada’s nuclear regulator. Before taking on the presidency of the CNSC, she questioned senior bureaucrats about the independence of the new post. Keen received the assurances she needed from them, or at least thought she had. (Some of them would later deny they gave her any promises of independence.) She took the job.
For six years, things worked as well as could be expected in an industry that wasn’t selling any reactors. From 2000 to 2006, through a handful of ministers of natural resources, the CNSC operated independently as quasi-judicial, arm’s-length tribunals should. Occasional attempts were made by AECL and other industry players to apply pressure to the regulator, but the ministers’ offices of the day refused to intervene or pressure Linda Keen. Then, in 2006, the universe changed for Canadians and Canada’s nuclear regulator. Stephen Harper won a minority government and Keen had a new minister at Natural Resources—a man who had practised law for two years before turning to politics, Gary
Lunn. Like a lot of senior civil servants, Keen was uncertain about how the new government would conduct its business.