From: “cdsapi”
Date: January 8, 2014 10:22:20 PM PST (CA)
Subject: Watch FIFTH ESTATE January 10 – Harper systematically destroys science records – buries and burns truth records
Cdsapi’s Added Comment: In Canada, Governmental dictatorial idiocy has morphed into irreversible criminal insanity.
How the Harper Government Committed a Knowledge Massacre
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/capt-trevor-greene/science-cuts-canada_b_4534729.html
If the science reference libraries, where past and recent science is recorded and archived, are dismantled and destroyed, then the Harper Government can easily (for its ideological propaganda reasons), say “there is no scientific evidence” whenever they insist on implementing insanely irresponsible polices and projects that spell known environmental and health devastation that spells ecological ruin and threatens the survival of life.
Big Money has a loud voice that seems to be drowning out all reason and wisdom. The repetitive Government chorus has become “To hell with the environment – it’s the economy that matters – we can’t let “environmental considerations” stop policies that make money. We can’t let “concern for the environment” halt “progress and technology”.
The propagation and protection of a TOXIC ECONOMY can only survive when decisions are made IN SECRET, behind closed doors, and dogmatically enforced whilst the records of “Scientific research” in our libraries are obliterated. When, at the same time, the Harper Government fires the scientists in its employ and shuts down research and watchdog departments, it guarantees that no further “unwanted science that exposes unwanted truths” will be able to rise like a phoenix from the ashes.
Once upon a time Canada led the world in authentic and reliable science research.
Today, under the Harper Government, Canada leads the world in insane, inconceivable, irreversible, “knowledge and science-research destruction”.
Welcome to Harper’s NEW Canada!
Make sure that you watch the Fifth Estate on January 10 – CBC TV
Please pass this on.
URGENT INFORMATION:
The destruction of Canada’s Science Libraries by Government edit.
The Fifth Estate, “The Silence of the Labs”, January 10th. CBC TV
January 6th, 2014, Courtenay, BC
Many of us have known about the willful destruction of our Canadian science libraries for a while, but it’s only now becoming public. The very short ‘youtube’ on the Fifth Estate website (below) will give you an idea of what the Federal government has been doing ‘behind the backs’ of Canadians and it’s very sad news. Andrew Nikiforuk (investigative journalist Calgary) was on CBC radio a few days ago talking about the ongoing Library destruction, calling it a “national tragedy bordering on a criminal act”.
Recently the government literally trashed approximately 7 Department of Fisheries and Oceans libraries across Canada, libraries that held years and years of research. We were aware of this story, but it was when we recently saw photographs (taken secretly) of the devastation that we felt kicked in the stomach – it looked as if a hurricane had ripped through the rooms.. books falling off shelves, many now empty. They have lied about the ‘why’ of doing such an act… saying that they were digitalized, but they weren’t. They have done the same to libraries under the Department of Environment, Parks, Immigration and the list goes on. The reason wasn’t for cost savings as the government is saving only a small amount – everyone knows the reasons are strictly ‘ideological’.
We forwarded the Fifth Estate program information to a Comox Valley social justice website dedicated to this kind of news, and when the editor emailed back to confirm she’d posted it, she added that a similar story is what happened to all of the journals and files from our west coast lighthouses when the government decommissioned them… they were thrown in bins or given away. More than 100 years of lighthouse history gone forever.
In the short video introduction to the Fifth Estate program you’ll see a woman, an anthropology researcher who has worked in the far north for over 25 years on a scientifically sensitive plot of land. One day she was told to take what was important to her and leave. We saw that program last year and it was heartbreaking. And in the helicopter scene you’ll see the host, Linden McIntyre and Dr. David Schindler, recently retired from the University of Alberta, an outspoken critic of the ongoing destruction of our beautiful Canadian environment. This important program is on The Fifth Estate, January 10th. Please check your local listings for times.
Please forward the notice of this program to as many people as possible. Maybe it’s not too late to save some of our Canadian heritage.
John and Rosemary Baxter
current and detailed article and photographs on the same subject…
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/capt-trevor-greene/science-cuts-canada_b_4534729.html
Jeremy Arney
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How the Harper Government Committed a Knowledge Massacre
Scientists are calling it “libricide.” Seven of the nine world-famous Department of Fisheries and Oceans [DFO] libraries were closed by autumn 2013, ostensibly to digitize the materials and reduce costs. But sources told the independent Tyee in December that a fraction of the 600,000-volume collection had been digitized. And, a secret federal document notes that a paltry $443,000 a year will be saved. The massacre was done quickly, with no record keeping and no attempt to preserve the material in universities. Scientists said precious collections were consigned to dumpsters, were burned or went to landfills.
Probably the most famous facility to get the axe is the library of the venerable St. Andrews Biological Station in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, which environmental scientist Rachel Carson used extensively to research her seminal book on toxins, Silent Spring. The government just spent millions modernizing the facility.
Also closed were the Freshwater Institute library in Winnipeg and the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Centre in St. John’s, Newfoundland, both world-class collections. Hundreds of years of carefully compiled research into aquatic systems, fish stocks and fisheries from the 1800s and early 1900s went into the bin or up in smoke.
Irreplaceable documents like the 50 volumes produced by the H.M.S. Challenger expedition of the late 1800s that discovered thousands of new sea creatures, are now moldering in landfills.
Renowned Dalhousie University biologist Jeff Hutchings calls the closures “an assault on civil society.”
“It is always unnerving from a research and scientist perspective to watch a government undermine basic research. Losing libraries is not a neutral act,” Hutchings says. He blames political convictions for the knowledge massacre.
“It must be about ideology. Nothing else fits,” said Hutchings. “What that ideology is, is not clear. Does it reflect that part of the Harper government that doesn’t think government should be involved in the very things that affect our lives? Or is it that the role of government is not to collect books or fund science?” Hutchings said the closures fit into a larger pattern of “fear and insecurity” within the Harper government, “about how to deal with science and knowledge.”
Many scientists have compared the war on environmental science to the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe. Hutchings muses, “you look at the rise of certain political parties in the 1930s and have to ask how could that happen and how did they adopt such extreme ideologies so quickly, and how could that happen in a democracy today?”