CANADIAN SCIENTISTS KNOW WHAT TO EXPECT FROM TRUMP
By Rachel B. Doyle at the New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/canadian-scientists-know-what-to-expect-from-trump
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The Canadian scientists I spoke with were careful to point out that the Harper government never interfered with their research in the way that the Trump Administration seems to be planning to do with the E.P.A. Harper did, however, energetically defund and suppress federal ecological research, and he scrapped many environmental regulations that he thought might impede growth in the oil and gas industries. Thousands of government scientists lost their jobs as a result. At the same time, there was a marked drop in coverage of scientific news generally, and an eighty-per-cent decrease in climate-change coverage in particular, according to a government report released in 2010. “When you silence an organization, what they are doing is out of the public eye,” Miller-Saunders said. “People conclude there’s not good science going on. Once you lose credibility, it’s easy to go and cut programs.”
Ultimately, the media crackdown and subsequent gutting of programs led to a brain drain. “We lost brilliant people who went to other countries to do their work,” May said. Thomas Pedersen, the chair of the Canadian Climate Forum, told me that he has already been approached by one senior American scientist who is considering leaving the United States for Canada. “Why would you want to be slowed down by some bureaucratic wrangle that is a result of perverse, anti-science ideology?” he said. “It’s usually the crème de la crème of scientists who will say, ‘I don’t need to put up with this stuff.’ ”
In the United States, the spectre of a brain drain was recently made more real by the Trump Administration’s de-facto ban on immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries, which will obstruct the flow of, and appeal for, talented scientists and students from abroad. Visas issued to people in the affected countries were cancelled by the State Department after Trump’s executive order, which has been temporarily stayed by a federal judge in Seattle and is the focus of a fierce legal battle likely to reach the Supreme Court. It is doubtful that any international science organizations would risk holding a conference here now, or that the affected visa holders will feel comfortable attending professional events or visiting family outside the country, lest they be barred from reëntering. Last week, a photograph of a doctor named Mazin Khalid went viral. Khalid, who went to medical school in Sudan, is shown in a linoleum-floored corridor at Brooklyn’s Interfaith Medical Center, holding a sign that reads, “I am taking care of your mom . . . but I can’t go see mine.”
If the Canadian experience can teach U.S. scientists anything, it’s that not only their future research but also their past work is at risk. “Watch your libraries,” May said. “Stuff was taken away in dumpsters. Raw data and archives were lost.” There is enough collective anxiety about U.S. climate data being destroyed, altered, or lost that several groups of concerned citizens spent the months before Trump’s Inauguration copying federal data and moving it to other servers. “Within weeks of Harper becoming Canada’s Prime Minster, the climate-change information was scrubbed from the Web site of Environment Canada and researchers were muzzled,” May said. “That took weeks. Trump is a lot faster.”
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