Harper government controls, silences scientists

In another example of how Steve "Detective Stephen" Harper is undermining and silencing scientists, Ottawa bureaucrats are preventing a fisheries scientist who heads a $6 million salmon genetics project at the federal Pacific Biological Station on Vancouver Island from talking about a discovery that could help revive plummeting Canadian salmon stocks, a study potentially so important that journalists from all over the world have been clamouring to speak with her.

The Privy Council Office, the secretariat of the federal cabinet, which provides advice and support to the prime minister and leadership, has allegedly forbidden Kristi Miller from talking about her findings, which have already been published in the top research journal Science. Science considers the work so significant it notified more than 7000 journalists about Miller's "Suffering Salmon" study, advising them to contact her for interviews. 

Not only has the Privy Council Office said no to the interviews, it has also blocked a Fisheries Department news release about the study, and Miller herself is not allowed to speak publicly about her discovery, according to documents obtained by Postmedia News under the Access to Information Act. 

Jeffrey Hutchings, senior fisheries scientist at Halifax's Dalhousie University, said:

"There is no question in my mind it's muzzling. When the lead author of a paper in Science is not permitted to speak about her work, that is suppression. There [are] simply no ifs, ands or buts about that." 

The idiot Harper is known for his government's strict control over federal scientists, whose work is financed by Canadian taxpayers.  Issues have included climate change and the environment, but in one bizarre case last year, scientist Scott Dallimore was forced to wait for "pre-clearance" to speak about a study on a northern Canada flood that occurred at the end of the last ice age.  Under der Diktator's the prime minister's rule, researchers, who have always been free to discuss their projects, are now subject to a complicated protocol of "media lines" and approvals by communications officers, strategists and ministerial staff in Ottawa who vet media requests, demand reporters' questions in advance and dictate when (and if!) researchers may give interview.  Most creepily of all, "media officers" record the few interviews scientists are permitted to give.  It is unknown what the penalties are for scientists who do not comply with these ridiculous Communist dictator-style rules.

The government did release 762 pages of documents relating to the Miller study to Postmedia News following their freedom of information request, but many passages and entire pages were blacked out.