Silence of the Labs - the fifth estate

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I've got conservative values, but honestly fuck this government. It goes against everything I loved about Canada. We were a progressive country that loved our science. Hell, I think science is responsible for the great reputation we had as a country 20 years ago and now it's all disappearing.

Fuck the conservative government.

👍︎︎ 47 👤︎︎ u/ThoryanX9000 📅︎︎ Jun 27 2015 🗫︎ replies

I love the Fifth Estate.

👍︎︎ 16 👤︎︎ u/dec0de 📅︎︎ Jun 27 2015 🗫︎ replies

Yeah, that is a terrible date idea.

👍︎︎ 17 👤︎︎ u/[deleted] 📅︎︎ Jun 27 2015 🗫︎ replies

Only has 6,000 views

You do realise that the Fifth Estate is a television program, right (which aired this episode over a year ago)? And that the CBC hosts this content online on their own website?

So why am I supposed to feel bad that the CBC's YouTube account only has 6,000 views, or why is this relevant to the content of the video?

👍︎︎ 4 👤︎︎ u/[deleted] 📅︎︎ Jun 27 2015 🗫︎ replies

I'm aware. Now what?

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/yvr_ent 📅︎︎ Jun 27 2015 🗫︎ replies

I read that as Stop Silencing Silence

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/jonnywarpspeed 📅︎︎ Jun 28 2015 🗫︎ replies

Seems like a pretty big boner killer for date night.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/[deleted] 📅︎︎ Jun 28 2015 🗫︎ replies
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>> It looks like it's been worse along here and here. >> Linden: She was digging up a thousand years of history, but it took just minutes to bury her career. >> She said you have five minutes to collect important personal things, and I said everything here is important to me, this is my life. >> Linden: He was dedicated to reversing the destruction of our oceans. >> You could hear a pin drop. People were ashen. We all knew what was happening. >> Linden: Scientists and science, decimated by a transformation in political priorities. >> It's crippled my life's work. >> Linden: Obliterating years of talent and experience. >> My entire research group disappeared. They deserved a better fate than this and for that reason, they won't come back. ( ♪♪ ) >> Linden: I'm Linden MacIntyre in Baffin Island. This is the story of the bitter conflict between ideology and knowledge. What can happen when factual discoveries raise inconvenient questions for politicians. It's a conflict that has transformed environmental law in Canada, shaking the foundations of public institutions, and is damaging the reputation of Canada among scientists and scholars around the world. It is the essence of everything we know about our world. Every life improvement from health to habitat began with science. Science, the mother of invention, once an independent arm of public policy. But in Canada, there is trouble in the realms of science. ( ♪♪ ) >> Linden: It is happening from coast to coast and north to the farthest reaches of the Arctic. Science that isn't practically useful for advancing policy objectives has been curtailed or scrapped. Hundreds of programs and world-renowned research facilities have lost their funding in the last five years. More than 2,000 federal government scientists and researchers have been dismissed. Programs that monitored smoke stack emissions, food inspection, oil spills, water quality and climate change were drastically cut or ended. The downside of an obsessive political focus on economics that critics warn ignores environmental peril and even rewrites history. ( ♪♪ ) >> Linden: Pat Sutherland, an archeologist, is travelling through time. Back a thousand years to a place where Viking ships explored the gateway to what we now call the Northwest Passage. ( ♪♪ ) >> Linden: Baffin Island. A remote and barren place they call the land of the stone slabs. A place for hunting and for trade with the local people. Dr. Sutherland is of a new explorer breed, scholars and academics with technology to uncover secrets lost in time. She's been coming here for years. You got interested in the Norse factor that other people ... >> Linden: Documenting some of the earliest recorded contacts between cultures from both sides of the Atlantic. >> This project was looking at contact and interaction in a very early time period, with indigenous people living in the Arctic. It was presenting the Arctic as complex and interesting a place as any other place in the world a thousand years ago. >> Linden: Her work was admired internationally and she was close to proving that Norse explorers based in greenland had been here earlier and for a longer time than anyone had previously known. A finding that was making headlines in scientific circles. It even excited mainstream media attention. On CBC TV, "The Nature of Things" did an hour on her in June of 2013. She got a photo and feature spread in "National Geographic." The European media was fascinated. The kind of exposure academics only dream about. >> It's like it's been worse along here and here. >> Linden: And it should have been a cause for celebration by her employer, the Canadian Museum of Civilization. >> I had expected that they would be pleased because this kind of media attention is rare for archeologists in Canada any way, and I had hoped that it would be seen as beneficial to the museum and that it would certainly help to promote continuation of the research. >> Linden: Behind the tourist-friendly facades, there's always been a serious purpose here. Original research exploring 20,000 years of human history through science, biology, geology, archeology. But if Sutherland expected celebration over high-end media publicity, she was in for a disappointment. Her focus was on a story about which her managers were becoming, to say the least, indifferent. In 2013, the museum was to be rebranded, and her archeology project didn't fit the new identity. From now on, the museum is to be primarily a vehicle for celebration. >> Canada needs a national institution that celebrates our achievements and what we have accomplished together as Canadians. The Canadian Museum of History. >> Linden: History, like science, the essence of who we are, where we came from. But the history the Harper government now wants the museum to emphasize is British through and through. Big on war, beginning with the war of 1812. >> 200 years ago... The United States invaded our territory. >> Linden: A campaign, including ads like this, will have cost $28 million, just to recreate and promote the war of 1812. >> We stood side-by-side. >> Well, we're going to see symbols of Canada's past, images of famous people, the monarchy, glorification of our role as a warrior nation, the kind of history that's consistent with the ideology of the current government. >> Linden: James Turk is the executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers. >> Whereas the Museum of Civilization's mandate was to increase Canadians and the world's critical understanding of cultural events in history, we're now reversing that. We're turning it into a glorified Madam Tussaud's Wax Museum or a Canadian history -- Canadian hockey Hall of Fame view of history. >> Linden: The Harper history of Canada leans heavily on a doomed British expedition that disappeared in 1845. The Franklin surge for the Northwest Passage. >> Rt. Hon. Stephen Harper: In exercising our sovereignty over these waters, we are also being faithful to all who came before us. Who, through great hardship and sacrifice, made a quest for knowledge of the north. Today, we are searching for Franklin, both literally and symbolically. >> Linden: Might be tempting to dismiss the government's fixation on the Franklin expedition, the war of 1812, the British monarchy as feel-good sentiment. It's much more than that. That's just a soft outer coating on a policy that's all about the rapid exploitation of natural resources in the north. And the political rewards they expect will follow, an unprecedented boom in material prosperity. It's a political objective bolstered by our British antecedents but not at all by a project that confirms a European presence here long before the British. >> So the emphasis for the Arctic seems to be on 19th century British naval exploration in the Northwest Passage. My work isn't in the Northwest Passage, it's on something that's too old. The project I think was not on message for the conservative government. >> Linden: At some point in 2010, Dr. Sutherland sensed diminishing support for her Baffin Island project. But she was too busy to take it very seriously. Did you have any clue just how perilous the situation was? >> No, I don't think so. I'm passionate about the work that I do, I love the work that I do and my focus was on that. (Chanting) >> No science, no evidence, no truth, no democracy. >> Linden: But pat Sutherland would soon discover a new political reality. A wave of outrage rising in unlikely places, in the labs and classrooms of the country and inevitably, it would flow out on to the streets. Unlikely radicals protesting an unlikely cause. The sacrifice of scientific knowledge on the altar of political expediency. And she would become a part of it. (Cheering) >> The facts do not change just because the Harper government has chosen ignorance over evidence. And ideology over honesty. (Cheering) >> Linden: They believe their work is being compromised, their voices silenced, that too much political interference with the work of scientists will have dire consequences for the environment and public health and scholarship. >> This is uncomfortable territory for any scientist to be in. >> Linden: Tom Duck is a professor of atmospheric science at Dalhousie university in Halifax. >> Hey, we're not used to making political arguments, we're not even interested in making political arguments but I think the circumstances require that we speak out. They require that we tell the public what's going on. >> Linden: When we come back, poisons in the ocean, blindness in bureaucracy. >> By default, what we have done in Canada is turn off the radar. We are flying along in an airplane, and we've put curtains over the windshield of those pilots of that flight crew, and we've turned off the instruments. ( ♪♪ ) ( ♪♪ ) >> Linden: Our oceans, like the Pacific, define our geography and have shaped our history. According to marine scientists, the oceans now hold alarming information about our future on the planet. The Pacific, scientific monitoring reveals it has become a toxic habitat for anything that lives in it, especially our marine relatives, the mammals like killer whales. >> We were looking at all sorts of species. We were looking at killer whales and harbour seals as really invaluable canneries out there in the ocean. >> Dr. Peter Ross spent 15 years building a powerful case that the ocean environment has been seriously degraded, that fish and animals who live there and people like the Inuit who eat them had become grotesquely toxic. >> We were looking at Beluga whales up in the Arctic, we were looking at ringed seals in Labrador, all of them telling us about these chemicals that know no boundaries, and travel around through atmospheric currents with impunity. We have the Inuit people who were discovered in the 1980s to be the most contaminated people on the planet, who would have expected that? >> Linden: Ross is unique. The only marine mammal toxicologist in Canada. He was head of a 55-member team of pollution specialists across the country, but he's also typical, for Peter Ross, science has no politics, no point of view. The facts owe loyalty to no one, which can be a challenge for a public sector scientist. >> Well, over my 15 years with the federal government, there are many uncomfortable situations when we would publish a paper on contaminants in fish, when we would -- when the media expressed an interest in what were the human health implications of finding these pollutants in seafoods, when we would document how contaminated some of these marine mammals are, in fact. Killer whales in British Columbia being 500 times more contaminated than the average Canadian. (seal barking) >> Linden: He didn't expect authorities in government or industry to celebrate his work, but nobody disputed that the information was important and that something should be done to mitigate or to reverse the damage. Ross felt that it was important to share his information with the people who were paying for it, taxpayers, and he made science easy for the public media. >> So these harbour seals are telling us what types of persistent chemicals are circulating in the environment and accumulating -- >> Linden: He was a frequent face on local newscasts until 2006. (cheering) >> Rt. Hon. Stephen Harper: Merci beaucoup. Tonight, friends, our great country has voted for change. (Cheering and Applause) >> Rt. Hon. Stephen Harper: And Canadians have asked our party to take the lead in delivering that change. (Cheering and Applause) >> Linden: With a new government in place, it wasn't long before new rules were introduced, that controlled contact with the media by Dr. Ross and other scientists who worked for the government of Canada. Decrees like this one would require all media requests to pass through a political spin machine, government communicators with specific instructions. Just as we have one department, one website, we should have one department, one voice. Nothing wrong with that except the voice would now be the voice of politics, not science. >> Since the first minority government came into power, I continued to do my research, but my ability to convey important findings to the general public, to the electorate, to the taxpayer has been severely curtailed. >> Science gives us facts, factoids, that we can use. It doesn't tell us what the thresholds should be. No scientist can say this is acceptable, this isn't. That's ultimately going to be a public choice. >> Linden: Dr. Peter Phillips is a University of Saskatchewan specialist in public policy, argues scientists should work behind the scenes, confidentially, to help politicians make the wisest choices possible. >> We don't have philosopher kings who make choices for us. We muddle through with collegial decision making and in that sense, scientists give us the evidence that accumulates and it generates compelling stories about how -- what can and should be done by society. But it doesn't tell us when do we move, it doesn't tell us where to move, it gives us some options. >> Linden: But the Harper ministries were becoming more selective in what they wanted scientists to tell them. They were actually spending more on science, but there was a fundamental shift in where the money went. Science geared to economic growth would do well. Science raising inconvenient caution signals about human health, climate change, habitat destruction, not so well. In labs and publicly-funded research institutes all across the country, lights were dimming and, for many, would soon be extinguished. Funding either ended or diverted to support the goals of industry and commerce. >> You measure this in -- >> Linden: An archeological dig that, if anything, might comfort Europeans looking for their own historical claim to Arctic riches suddenly became a low priority. By early 2012, Pat Sutherland, one of a diminishing number of pure scientists working for the Museum of Civilization was feeling the chill and it wasn't all from the north wind. >> I was certainly being monitored. It was difficult to work in the museum at that point. >> The silence was really deafening the last couple of years in the employment of the federal government. There was a certain hollow ring to the hallways as we went to work, and we continued to publish, we had lots of work, we kept ourselves busy. >> Linden: By Spring 2012, the Peter Ross workplace near Victoria, B.C. wasn't pleasant but he didn't realize that his career was on the line. >> When I arrived at my desk 8:30 one morning and there was an E-mail indicating that I was to meet with managers in the boardroom upstairs at 9:00 a.m. and then at five to 9:00, I walked out of my office, and everybody in my entire wing walked out of their office, walked upstairs and into the boardroom. >> Linden: His story would have resonated with Pat Sutherland. She'd even sought outside funding to supplement the shrinking budget for her work. Then, like Peter Ross, she was summoned to a meeting. >> I was presented with an envelope and the envelope, contents of the envelope said that I was to appear at 9:30 on the Monday for a meeting. >> No eye contact, everyone was staring at their shoes. There's a box of kleenex in the middle of the table. Without any conversation beginning, you could hear a pin drop. People were ashen. We all knew what was happening. A letter was read to us that had been written in Ottawa announcing the termination of our entire program. No more ocean pollution research and monitoring, we don't consider this to be part of our mandate. >> And a statement was read by the vice-president of research and collections telling me that I was dismissed and the HR person told me that she would accompany me to my office. She said you have five minutes to collect important personal things and I said everything here is important to me, this is my life. And then a security guard appeared at the door, a large man, and I was walked out of the building into the edge of the property. >> Linden: How do you choose, after all those years, what to take in that five-minute window that they presented you with? >> I took nothing. >> Linden: When the axe fell, she would discover that investigators had prepared a 445-page report that lays out a highly-personal attack which she sees as the prologue to her dismissal. A potentially-damning document museum officials were only too swift to share with us, even though they refused to discuss her firing in a formal interview. The report is a repentative litany of complaints mostly based on the evidence of former colleagues, their critique boiled down to an unflattering if not uncommon portrayal of a single-minded scientist, bossy and impatient, a perfectionist who sometimes spoke too bluntly, but it helped to get her fired and her dismissal brought an end to her beloved Baffin Island project. ( ♪♪ ) >> Linden: When we come back, deep thoughts and plain talk. >> But you can't run a democracy and make it function on a public informed with B.S. ( ♪♪ ) ( ♪♪ ) >> Linden: Even from the remote perspective of an astronaut, the human imprint is unmistakable. It dominates the northern hemisphere. And dominating that, the Athabasca oilsands. A vast, industrial machine that grinds out jobs and wealth for all Canadians, but at a cost yet uncalculated and perhaps incalcuable. But government and industry would have us focus on a somewhat different picture. (advertisement voiceover) >> The oilsands is a powerful source of Canadian energy. >> Linden: The advocacy is constant whether through gorgeous commercial propaganda or broad stroke political spin that's difficult to challenge. (advertisement voiceover) >> It happened because of the human energy that goes into it. >> Linden: The upbeat industry perspective is music to the ears of politicians who dream of a Canada that will become an energy superpower. But it has turned an unprecedented number of Canadian scientists into critics of the Harper government. >> There's still this idea that globalization is the solution to economic prosperity and we have to be more aggressive than anyone else for Canadians to get their share. >> Linden: Dr. David Schindler won international renown in the 1960s, '70s and '80s as a founder of the experimental lakes area project in northwestern Ontario, a one-of-a-kind facility that led to innovative policies to control acid rain and pollution from domestic phosphates. For nearly a quarter century, till he retired in October 2013, he was professor of Ecology at the University of Alberta where his research raised alarms about pollution from the oilsands. He's become a leading critic of an ideology that raises material prosperity to primary importance in almost every aspect of public policy. So we brought him with us on a tour of the Athabasca project. >> You pick up any newspaper, you go on almost any website, you turn on the television, and there's an ad every half hour telling you how wonderful the oilsands are, and we have public officials, both provincially and federally, running around saying things like we have the toughest environmental regulations in the world. Simply not the case. >> Linden: Joe Oliver, Minister of Natural Resources, is the political point man for the federal policy that has outraged many scientists. He wouldn't talk to us, but he's far from shy, projecting his upbeat vision of flat-out resource exploitation without environmental consequences. >> The world will not stand by and wait until Canada endlessly deliberates the merits of its resource potential and squanders its legacy. Canada is well-known for its high environmental standards, and they will be enhanced, but we must also seize the enormous opportunities presented to our country in the global market so we can secure prosperity for future generations of Canadians. >> They're feeding the public a bunch of hogwash, and I think it's -- I think most people would accept that you can't run a democracy and make it function on a public informed with B.S. >> Linden: For the Harper government, prosperity starts here. The Athabasca region in northern Alberta. A 140,000 square kilometre resevoir of potential energy. An estimated 168 billion barrels of a raw fuel source called bitumin, a porridge of oil and sand, clay and water. >> Linden: You just tell me what this is. >> This is just a mine pit that has water seeping into it. >> Linden: Schindler is one scientist who has definitely not been silenced. He's now retired but this is his new battle ground, the ecology of northern Alberta, his new crusade. Schindler and his team of researchers found that intense oilsands development was contaminating the Athabasca watershed. Fish exposed to this water developed deformities and tumours. >> You can imagine you've got-- you saw something like that in Safeway lying with a bunch of normal fish. >> Linden: When the findings were published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Schindler was roundly criticized and contradicted by both the Alberta and federal governments. Why do you think the government is so concerned about what scientists have to say? >> I think their philosophy is that policy should drive science rather than what scientists think is that science should be reflected in policy. So it's like they don't want to hear about science anymore. This stuff is always in their face, they want policies to reflect economics 100%, economics being only what you can sell, not what you can save. >> It's when we start interpreting the evidence as what it says about what governments should or should not do that you're starting to usurp the policy prerogative of the executive government. >> Linden: Dr. Peter Phillips, who is an economist, believes that democracy is all about choices and decisions and decision making must be in the hands of politicians. >> That's their job. Their job is to frame policy debates and frame dialogue. Do they ignore some important issues? Undoubtedly. This government's not unique. Every government has issues that they just don't want to address. >> We have a government who really, really doesn't grasp what science is about. Okay? They really don't know what science is for. >> Linden: Tom Duck is a professor of physics and atmospheric science at Dalhousie University. >> It's very important that scientists are able to maintain that distance between what they're doing and any policy, what we need to do is be seen as impartial advisors. Unfortunately, that link has been broken. And it's been badly broken. >> Linden: June 2012, if there was any doubt about who controls public policy, scientists or politicians, it vanished with a single piece of legislation in the House of Commons. >> All those in favour, please say yea. >> (Together): Yea! >> All those opposed, please say nay. >> (Together): Nay! >> Linden: Bill C-38, supposedly a budget bill. But MPs would discover buried in its more than 400 pages and 700 clauses, fundamental changes in more than 70 pieces of existing legislation. Including just about every existing measure to manage and protect the environment. It would cancel 3,000 environmental assessments, gut existing legislation, and demolish programs protecting fish, lakes, rivers, and oceans. One high-profile victim of the axe, Schindler's decades-old experimental lakes project where scientists had pioneered controls for acid rain and the reduction of pollution in our waterways. And it was the beginning of the end for Dr. Peter Ross and his work documenting the destruction of our ocean habitat. >> Bill C-38 really spelled the end of the federal government's interest in ocean pollution and it was only a question of time and degree in terms of what the consequences, what the outcome was going to be for our work. >> The use of omnibus bills as budget measures is an interesting process. >> Linden: And Dr. Peter Phillips believes appropriate in this case, environmental regulation impacts directly on the economy and definitely needed a radical overhaul. >> I think there's a strong argument to be said that we have historically built up regulatory systems that were all well-intentioned but that the burden increased to a point that exceeded the benefits of the regulation themselves. We just regulated for regulation sake. >> Linden: It was getting in the way of development. >> It was getting in the way of expeditious decision making. >> Linden: It was a big change in a hurry, but government had help, most influentially not from scientists but from industry. Months before bill C-38 was introduced, the oil and gas industry, including the Canadian association of petroleum producers, weighed in with this letter to former environment minister Peter Kent, in effect a wish list of initiatives to expedite resource development. Existing legislation was outdated, too focused on prevention. Governments should make adjustments to existing legislation and take a more positive approach, economic growth, jobs. Bill C-38 gave them almost everything they asked for. We asked two senior bureaucrats and four cabinet ministers with responsibility for resources, the environment and science to explain their policies and their expectations and to answer critics who argue that by dismantling public sector agencies and protocols for protecting the environment they have e-masculated science and public sector scientists. All refused. Scientists and other public servants use words like gutted, muzzled. >> And in some cases I think that's true. >> Linden: Environmental regulation gutted? >> Not obviously. I mean -- >> Linden: Bill C-38 didn't gut 12 or so pieces of environmental protection legislation? >> I mean, I haven't seen major developments that have emerged in the intervening period. I think what's happened is there's been a rebalancing. To some people, that's gutting because it changes the balance of power in these processes. Undoubtedly, if what the government has done works the way they hope it will work, it will speed up the process. Which for those who do not want to see certain types of development will be gutting. ( ♪♪ ) >> Linden: When we come back, heading for the last bonanza. >> What kind of economy do you expect you can have with poisoned waterways and with polluted air? ( ♪♪ ) >> Not a lot of room in there. (Applause) >> Linden: The Arctic for Prime Minister Harper has become a legacy destination. He sees potential here for a place in history for Canada and for his party. It will all depend on access to resources. >> Rt. Hon. Stephen Harper: All this potential development reminds us that, as I said before, the north is Canada's call to greatness. These developments will bring growth, jobs and prosperity to this territory across the north and indeed across the entire country. >> Linden: Prosperity, the upside of climate change. A retreating icecap that offers new opportunities to hunt for oil and gas and minerals at the top of the planet. Perhaps a quarter of the world's undiscovered resource wealth soon to be accessible through newly-opened waterways. A political and economic prospect not to be diminished by alarmist scientists. Like Dr. Tom Duck, who helped to turn the high Arctic into a climate lab and an alarming window on the future. >> What kind of economy do you think you can have when climate change is ravaging the planet? All the projections for that say it's going to be very, very, very expensive, so, again, it's not a question of one -- of the economy or the environment. It's both or it's neither. >> Linden: Dr. Duck of Dalhousie University in Halifax is one of the founders of the polar environment atmospheric research laboratory, Pearl for short. Monitoring the Arctic climate since 2004, just a thousand kilometres from the north pole, the research station was one-of-a-kind, and provided scientific data on ozone depletion and climate change for scientists around the world. But in 2012, its budgets were cut so drastically, Professor Duck was forced to halt his research there. >> We know that climate change is an enormous problem. It is the problem for the next century. So if you want to get out your oil, you have to get it out now. If you want to get it out now, you have to make sure scientists aren't causing any problems. If you want to make sure scientists aren't causing any problems, you take away all their funding. >> It shows me that the government of Canada, it doesn't really want to know about ocean pollution. >> Linden: Dr. Peter Ross, until mid-2013, was leading world-class research into the impact of pollution on mammals in the oceans, whales, seals, walrus. He and his entire department, 55 people, were abruptly cut, suddenly redundant, like a thousand other environmental watch dogs in the federal department of fisheries and oceans. >> And what government manager in Ottawa is going to want to hear bad news that they're going to have to do something about when they've already got enough on their desk? >> Linden: He is now considering a job offer in the private sector. But he'll find it hard to recover the passion that inspired his public service science. >> It really erodes your self-esteem when the government of Canada tells you that your type of person is no longer desirable, that what you are a world expert in is irrelevant to the government of Canada. >> Linden: So this whole place was kind of like your office. >> The area that we studied -- >> Linden: Dr. Ross mourns his lost engagement with public policy but he worries that the bigger losers in the long run are future leaders who will have responsibility for policy development without the benefit of independent fact-based science. >> By default, what we have done in Canada is turn off the radar. We are flying along in an airplane, and we've put curtains over the windshield of those pilots, of that flight crew, and we've turned off the instruments. We don't know what is coming tomorrow, let alone next year, in terms of some of these potentially-catastrophic incidents in our oceans. >> Linden: Even jobless, even with the approach of another Arctic winter, Pat Sutherland keeps coming back to the place that has consumed her time and energy and expertise for 13 years. >> Linden: Coming in here on the boat, you were saying, I'm home, so great to be back here. >> Yeah. >> Linden: What is main feeling? >> Sadness. And frustration. Both, yeah. It's not just the site but I've established relationships in this community. I've had young people working on these sites and the work gives them a sense of pride about their past. >> Linden: It's abandoned now, tantalizing questions left unanswered. A mystery unsolved. A final chapter yet unwritten. The dig that was the project of a lifetime for Dr. Sutherland, a potential breakthrough for Canada and an international community of scholars, became a grave for her career. Since her dismissal, she's been denied access to the product of decades of scholarly work for the museum. She worries about what has happened to artifacts and documents, painstakingly assembled over decades. James Turk, Executive Director at the Canadian Association of University Teachers sees a dangerous precedent in what happened here. >> What's even more troubling is not only is she let go, but she's denied access to material she needs to continue her work. >> I think her case illustrates, pretty dramatically, some of the problems with the politicization of science and the politicization of these kinds of matters. >> Linden: And then in Ottawa, in late November 2013, just as Pat Sutherland thought the museum could no longer shock her, the biggest shock of all, a new creative partnership, a financial sponsor. >> That sponsor is the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, which represents one of the largest sectors of the Canadian economy. >> Linden: It was a marriage of convenience with a million dollar dowry from the groom. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the high-profile lobby group that has been influential in reshaping science, now a partner in defining history. For more than two years, scientists have been pushing back. On this September day in 2013, there were similar demonstrations by private sector and academic scientists in 17 centres across Canada. The worst consequences of what they call the war on science may well await future generations, but they insist real damage has already started and might be irreversible. Professor Duck still has a job because he's an academic. But the lab in Halifax where scientists processed data from the Arctic station is now abandoned, much of the equipment closed down and slated for storage. >> It crippled my life's work, my entire research group disappeared, okay. So I had people leave and take up jobs in the U.K., others, you know, took up work in the U.S. The kind of people I had working in this group are not the kind of people that you can find just anywhere. They were the best in the world. And you have to understand, they deserved a better fate than this, and for that reason, they won't come back. ( ♪♪ ) >> Linden: Science will continue with or without government support, in spite of politics. ( ♪♪ ) >> Linden: But for the public sector scientist Pat Sutherland, her scientific mission, the project of a lifetime on Baffin Island is now history. ( ♪♪ )
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Channel: undefined
Views: 862,306
Rating: 4.4954324 out of 5
Keywords: CBC Television (TV Network), CBC News (Website Owner), Science, The Fifth Estate (Award-Winning Work), Linden MacIntyre, Silence Of The Labs
Id: PMC9fsn-3is
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 42min 10sec (2530 seconds)
Published: Fri Oct 03 2014
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