Change in Research Direction, and Role in Muzzling Scientists
In 2011, NRC President John McDougall began to oversee a change in research focus away from basic research and towards industrial-relevant research. This included the development of several "flagship programs", shifting research budget out of existing research and into a few focused programs. One flagship program, "Algal Carbon Conversion", is related to prior interests of Mr. McDougall, as he previously headed Innoventures, a company involved in lobbying for the development of an algae system to recycle carbon emissions. The NRC was not involved in this area of research prior to the arrival of Mr. McDougall.
Under the tenure of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Canadian Government research organizations began to restrict the ability of government scientists to communicate with the public. This includes restricting scientists within the NRC to communicate with the public through non-scientist communications personnel. In June, 2012, the federal opposition made a motion in parliament "That, in the opinion of the House, Canadian scientific and social science expertise is of great value and, therefore, the House calls on the Government to end its muzzling of scientists; to reverse the cuts to research programs at Environment Canada, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Library and Archives Canada, National Research Council Canada, Statistics Canada, and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada; and to cancel the closures of the National Council of Welfare and the First Nations Statistical Institute."
Read more about this topic: National Research Council Of Canada
Famous quotes containing the words change, research, role and/or scientists:
“Revolutions demand enormous sacrifices and, at the same time, create a new need to change the world again.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)
“Our science has become terrible, our research dangerous, our findings deadly. We physicists have to make peace with reality. Reality is not as strong as we are. We will ruin reality.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)
“Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“There is not much that even the most socially responsible scientists can do as individuals, or even as a group, about the social consequences of their activities.”
—Eric J. Hobsbawm (b. 1917)