Prime Minister Justin Trudeau campaigned aggressively on the issue of science in the lead up to the last federal election. And it makes sense that he did: for the first time ever in Canadian history the issue of scientific integrity was a major election issue for voters across the nation.
Images of shuttered libraries, gagged scientists and dumpsters full of books haunted the Canadian imagination under the Harper government.
Trudeau promised to change all of that. Brandishing the language of the scientific community itself Trudeau painted a vision of a Canadian scientific renaissance, with the restoration of scientific integrity and the veritable holy grail of political vows: evidence-based decision-making.
“As a scientist, I was personally thrilled with the Liberal government’s vocal support for science, especially regarding the critical role that scientific evidence should play in informed decision-making,” Wendy Palen, associate professor and biologist at Simon Fraser University, told DeSmog Canada.
In the early days of the federal government under Trudeau, there were several events that shored up that sense of optimism including the anchoring of ministerial duties in science in open mandate letters and restored funding for research in the first Liberal budget.
Trudeau also promised to bring social and scientific credibility back to the environmental assessments of major resource projects.
“I think I can say the scientific community breathed a sigh of relief over the change in attitude around science and the role of scientific decision-making,” Palen said.
But, she added, that sentiment has stopped short in recent months.
In September the federal government approved the controversial Pacific Northwest LNG export terminal near Prince Rupert, B.C. The terminal is expected to become Canada’s single largest point source of greenhouse gas emissions.
Although opposed by all major environmental organizations in B.C., the project and its treatment under the federal review system raised a number of red flags for the scientific community in particular.
Proposed for the Flora Bank estuary, a unique eelgrass bed that provides resting grounds for hundreds of thousands of juvenile salmon from the Skeena watershed, the LNG terminal’s proposed site clashed hard with biologists and members of the conservation community who say, when it comes to salmon, a worse location simply couldn’t have been selected.
The federal environmental assessment of the LNG terminal — which concluded destroyed salmon habitat could simply be rebuilt elsewhere — was so fraught with problems members of the scientific community penned an open letter to Trudeau and his cabinet, pleading with them to reject the project’s review.
In that letter, scientists detailed a fundamentally flawed assessment process in which peer-reviewed science was ignored, basic principles of scientific investigation were violated and research paid for by the project’s proponent, Malaysian-owned Petronas, was given primacy.
The federal government ignored those pleas from the scientific community and on a September evening environment and climate minister Catherine McKenna announced the project’s approval.
“This project was subject to a rigorous environmental assessment and today’s announcement reflects this commitment,” she said.
Hearing those words, many scientists in B.C. were simply perplexed.
More recently Trudeau along with members of his cabinet approved the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline under a review process so thoroughly broken, Trudeau campaigned on the explicit promise to scrap it entirely.
But that’s not what happened and last month scientists were again baffled at the cooptation of the language of science in the pipeline’s approval.
“This is a decision based on rigorous debate, on science and on evidence. We will not be swayed by political arguments,” Trudeau said.
“If I thought this project was unsafe for the B.C. coast, I would reject it.”
For Palen, the announcement was particularly confounding.
Along with two co-authors, Palen wrote to Trudeau in the weeks prior to the pipeline announcement informing him of a new analysis that identified significant gaps in knowledge and research specifically on the impacts of Alberta oilsands crude, known as bitumen, on marine organisms.
A review of over 9,000 studies found not enough is known about the potential effects of an oil spill from the tankers that will be fed by the Trans Mountain pipeline to say with certainty the project is safe.
“The government’s words and use of the words ‘evidence-based decision-making’ are starting to be questioned by myself and others in the scientific community,” Palen said.
“I heard many of my colleagues wonder what the government really means by ‘evidence-based decision-making’ because those aren’t just empty words — they have a really specific meaning to those of us in science policy and in scientific fields.”
Caesuria 