Weaver Slams Harper's War on Science, on Canada, on the Canadian People

Leading Canadian climate scientist Andrew Weaver has laid into Stephen Harper in this morning's Times Colonist.   The U. Vic. prof accuses Harper of putting fossil fuel interests ahead of everything else - including Canada and the Canadian people.

"...in June 2007, Prime Minister Steven Harper told world leaders that climate change was "perhaps the biggest threat to confront the future of humanity today," and that "we owe it to future generations to do whatever we can to address this world problem."

The federal government apparently understands the seriousness of the issue and so wants to do something about it. But when you scratch below the surface, it doesn't take long to find out how vacant and cynical these statements are.

The much-anticipated new and improved federal regulations on greenhouse gas emissions from coalfired electricity plants leaked out this week. To no one's surprise, they are significantly weakened from what we had been told to expect.

 ...So we now have a government willingly and knowingly committing future generations to ecological collapse and untold climate-related catastrophes. Since members of the government have read, and selectively quoted from, our study on the warming potential of coal, it's clear they understand the issue. Despite this, they are introducing policies that will ensure we have coal-fired electricity plants spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for decades to come.

Will future generations hold these ideologues in Ottawa accountable for their actions? I certainly hope so.

And as the Arctic sea ice breaks new records, the federal government responds with its fourth headline-grabbing, yet issue-distracting, search for the missing Franklin ship in five years. Quietly, it sets in place countrywide medieval-style book-burnings as it shuts down and destroys the collections contained in scientific libraries at its federal laboratories across the nation.

At the same time, we find out the feds are planning to build a multimilliondollar "world-class" Canadian High Arctic Research Station in Cambridge Bay.

But don't kid yourself; this has nothing to do with science.

In science, you first ask a question that you want to address and then you put together the tools, instruments and programs to try to answer it. This is precisely what was done by Environment Canada in 1993 under the Mulroney government's progressive Green Plan.

The Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory in Eureka, formally known as the Arctic Stratospheric Ozone Observatory, was built to monitor, study and report on the status of the Earth's protective Arctic ozone layer. It sat on Ellesmere Island, about 1,100 kilometres from the North Pole for scientific reasons. Yet just when the ozone hole reaches record levels, the Tories shut down funding for the laboratory. Gone is Canada's ability to monitor the Arctic ozone hole. And gone is the investment of tens of millions of dollars of Canadian taxpayer funding.

Instead, the Tories offer up a facility in search of science to justify its existence. There are no scientific questions driving this agenda. The establishment of the Canadian High Arctic Research Station is all about enforcing sovereignty in the North to pave the way for enhanced resource extraction, particularly in the oil-and-gas sector.

Sure, there will be opportunists in the scientific community who will take advantage of the facility if it's built, just like barnacles will find and latch onto a new ship brought into a harbour. But the real question is: When will the federal government come clean with its agenda?

So as we move into the autumn of the second year under the Harper regime, the war on science and the environment continues. Is there no one left in the Conservative party willing to stand up to this shortsighted and one-dimensional view of the world? Apparently not.