George Orwell & Franz Kafka

It would be easy to make fun of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s control-freak Conservatives for yesterday’s revelation in the mainstream media that they have tried to put a deep chill on reporting about the Ice Age.

Leastways, it was a story about the Ice Age that tipped the media to the fact the Harper government has muzzled scientists employed by Natural Resources Canada, instructing them to say nothing about anything without the approval of political commissars in the office of Natural Resources Minister Christian Paradis.

The media was gobsmacked to learn that not only are these taxpayer-paid scientists told to shut the heck up about the tarsands, climate change and similar “controversial” topics, but that they also need to zip their lips “about floods at the end of the last Ice Age.”

These “Orwellian” new rules went into effect last March, and the media only noticed just now. Possibly they would have noticed sooner had the rules been “Kafkaesque,” one supposes.

(Readers may wonder about the difference between these two common journalistic terms, both of which are usually used to mean, “I haven’t heard of this before.” The first is named after the author and former journalist, George Orwell, and normally implies the use of language that means the opposite of what it says. The second is named for the author and former civil servant Franz Kafka, and means “really flipping’ weird,” a sentiment anyone who has worked in government will understand. A few Canadian journalists have read Orwell, but none are thought to have read anything by Kafka. Arguably, Kafkaesque would have been more appropriate adjective in this case. However, je digresse.)

This intelligence tidbit about the new reporting rules for NRC scientists came from the delightfully named Postmedia News (post-media? I’ll say! news? occasionally…), which seems only to have come across the story about the new information controls because these selfsame federal scientists failed to return calls in a timely fashion when a Postmedia reporter sat down at her post-work station to write a story on the Ice Age floods.

Reading between the lines, readers will conclude without surprise that the reporter wanted to do the story in the first place because of a publicity handout issued by a British university “to alert the media … about a colossal flood that swept across northern Canada 13,000 years ago, when massive ice dams gave way at the end of the last ice age.”

These details, wrote the astonished journalist, were “deemed so sensitive” that the scientist “was told he had to wait for clearance from the minister’s office.” Later, one of the people interviewed for this yarn refers to the research as “a nice, feel-good science story about flooding at the end of last glaciation.”

Do these college-educated journalists not understand that talking about anything that happened 13,000 years ago is controversial among the voters who make up a significant portion of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s political base? Just ask Stockwell Day, who will inform you that the world is only 6,000 years old.

On the other hand, if the dates can only be finessed a little, scientific news of a big flood could be considered a good thing in Mr. Harper’s circles….

OK, that’s the making-fun-of-the-government part. Thus endeth the lesson. The same speaker goes on to get to the real point, concluding: “…Can you imagine trying to get access to scientists with information about cadmium and mercury in the Athabasca River? Absolutely impossible.”

Well, there you have it, actually. This is a government that disputes mainstream scientific opinions on such issues as pollution from tarsands mining and climate change for political and ideological reasons.

This is also a government that harnesses voodoo economics to serve the interests of its powerful corporate backers, so it should hardly surprise us that it is uncomfortable both with the idea of independent government scientists who see themselves as serving the people, not corporate political interests, and with research results that are based on honest research and not ideology.

This kind of reliance on voodoo science is the motivating factor behind the long-form census brouhaha, and it is the motivation behind the new rules about dealing with the media that face NRC’s scientists.

Above all, this is a government that wants to control all information at all times. Indeed, those of us who are inclined to assail the United States for its many faults should be thankful that our neighbour has such a profound commitment to free speech. One suspects that without that example next door (and without the inconvenience of a minority Parliament, of course), the Harper government would do more than just issue directives to public employees about talking to the media.

If NRC is prepared to let its scientists talk to bloggers and the community press, as the story suggests, and just control their access to national and international media, that is only evidence of the incompetence of their media handlers, not their benevolence.

That the Harper Conservatives campaigned on a platform of openness and honesty can quite properly be termed Orwellian, even if its policies devolve into the merely Kafkaesque when they involve matters that took place before the last glacial era.

This instinctive desire by the Harper Conservatives to suppress facts that do not buttress its ideology and the economic interests of its supporters is not going to be stopped by a shocked story in the mainstream media.

Only by sweeping these so-called Conservatives out of power can real honesty and integrity be restored to our federal government.

This post also appears on David Climenhaga’s blog, Alberta Diary.

David J. Climenhaga

David J. Climenhaga

David Climenhaga is a journalist and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions with the Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. He left journalism after the strike...