The Dumbing Down of Canada - Election 2015

The Harper Conservatives attack on Science, Information & Data

It's a topic that most Canadians don't know much about and, sadly, that many don't care much about.  We live in the 21st Century, not the 18th, and knowledge is power.  Science is a powerful tool in the hands of any society.  Data enables informed decisions that empower a country and its society.

None of these things seem to matter much to the Harper Conservatives.  In fact, the evidence shows that the Harper Conservatives much prefer ideology to data, or knowledge.

The shortened version of what the Harper Conservatives have done to science is well-described here.

A short list from that article would include actions like controlling how Environment Canada communicated with the media, eliminating the position of National Science Advisor, eliminating the long-form census, eliminating science jobs, defunding scientific research and closing research libraries and dumping research reports into the dumpster.

Scientists are so concerned that in this election, researchers who tend to stick pretty close to their labs are now organizing and fighting back.

In an article that ran recently in the Edmonton Journal about the decline in our National Parks, was the following quote:

Professional staff is threatened by gag orders. Staff firings, without cause, add to the unease. Travel to conferences is limited, locking up Canadian know-how that would otherwise be readily shared with the world. Budget cuts, with science reduced by a third, have placed monitoring and evidence based protection at risk.

More and more Canadians are becoming concerned with changes to legislation protecting our waterways.  It's pretty clear that these changes were made to enable energy and pipeline companies free reign when crossing streams and rivers.

Part of our concern should be the fact that religious ideology is shaping government policy on everything from foreign policy to environmental concerns.  I wrote about this earlier in a review of The Armageddon Factor - The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada.

Indeed the whole issue about information and data is so troubling that Macleans Magazine wrote a lengthy piece on it in Mid-September.  Part of that story deals with the elimination of the long-form census, a move that was referred to as "an unmitigated disaster".

This conscious decision to ignore facts, data and information shows up in many places, some where you'd least expect.

For example, Mr Harper's statements on illegal drugs.  Also here.  Mostly baloney.  If it was just his stance on pot, that would be one thing, but in a different issue, ideological positions dictate that larger prisons need to be built to be "touch on crime" even while the data shows that crime rates have been dropping steadily for decades.  Once again, data is ignored.  Play to the fear.  Play to your base.  Ignore the facts.

It's sad, really.  Canada is an educated country.  We should be doing more, not less.  

I guess the ultimate comment about where we have gone appeared in an article published in the NY Times, called The Closing of the Canadian Mind.

It's time for a change.