President Trump’s early executive actions and rhetoric about climate change and vaccines have a lot of American scientists on edge right now – worried about funding cuts, gag orders, and travel and immigration restrictions. To our north, Canadian scientists might as well be saying “been there, done that.” Between 2006 and 2015, the Conservative Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, slashed science funding, dissolved jobs and projects, and severely limited public communication.
It didn't happen all at once. In fact, John Dupuis, science librarian at York University's Steacie Science & Engineering Library, says that, at first, it was a lot of little things - changes to environmental regulations, some projects de-funded.
"One of the ones that was a harbinger of things to come was when the National Science Advisor position was deleted shortly after the Harper Government took power," said Dupuis. "That was probably the biggest early one."
For the first few years that Harper was in office, the Conservatives were running a minority government. That meant they were constrained in how much of their agenda they could enact. (Think President Obama with a Republican Congress.)
That changed in 2011???
John Dupuis is Science Librarian at Steacie Science & Engineering Library, York University, Toronto. He chronicled the Harper administration’s science policies on his Confessions of a Science Librarian blog. And he’s now doing the same for the Trump administration.
"2011-2012 seemed to be a bit of a tipping point," said Kathleen Walsh, interim executive director of Evidence for Democracy. "A lot of the stories of muzzling had really started to come to the media's attention and the public's attention. All of that sort of caused the original planning of the Death of Evidence Rally."
In 2012, ... Death of Evidence mock funeral ... eulogies for lost science
That's also what led to the founding of Evidence for Democracy, a non-partisan, non-profit organization that advocates for evidence-based public policy.
Walsh says that American scientist have a leg up. For one, she points to the Union for Concerned Scientists, which does similar work to Evidence for Democracy but has been around for much longer. And now, American scientists have the experience of their Canadian colleagues to draw on.
... advice ...