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Hands off of scientific work

As you may have heard, Alberta’s provincial government was caught red-handed when it was undeniably demonstrated

As you may have heard, Alberta’s provincial government was caught red-handed when it was undeniably demonstrated that it secretly paid two academic institutions to “buy academic approval for its policies”, as described by the Alberta Federation of Labour (AFL), the organization that uncovered the secret arrangement.

According to the information available, the provincial government paid a total of $1.5 million to University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy and Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economy to have them conduct research that "supports the policy agenda of Alberta Energy."

According to an AFL statement, documentation for both grants also includes clauses that the U of C will “not make any public announcement or issue any news release regarding this agreement or the grant,” except in consultation with or the approval of the province.

There are several wrongs on the part of the government here, but the two most important are a) the secrecy and b) the motivation by the government to distort scientific research for political ends.

With regard to secrecy, as it was mentioned in the AFL statement, education in Alberta is publicly funded anyway and it was perfectly legal for the government to support that scientific research. But the urge to keep this funding secret from the public speaks for itself when it comes to the motives for commissioning the studies, which brings us to the next wrong: By demanding that the research conducted by the institutions support its policies, the government is actually ordering the academic staff to twist, not to say distort, their findings in a way that will benefit politicians.

Well, what can one say?

Politicians will be politicians and it is not surprising that they will do things that are not proper or that they should not be doing.

But in this episode, there is something more disturbing: According to the AFL statement, which has not been denied, Jack Mintz, chair of the School of Public Policy, one of the recipients of the secret funding, asked the Government of Alberta to vet his paper on imposing a sales tax in Alberta, before it was peer-reviewed or published, a move that might be directly related to Mintz’s status as a member of the board of Imperial Oil.

Now, this is nothing but voluntary surrender of academic integrity to the mercy of politicians and there cannot be any excuse for that.

Since the Reagan-Thatcher approach to capitalism (which finds a dedicated follower in today’s Ottawa) bulldozed in the ‘80s many of the values that made the West the envy of the world, science has remained one of the few areas where the trend to become influenced by finance and, by extension, politics failed to get a strong foothold.

Let’s hope that Jack Mintz will just be an exception and politicians will fail in their efforts to taint academia in their frantic search for power.