Scientific Dark Ages In Canada

"ELA is just one example underway, albeit a major one.  This is barely even Round One yet.  I think they mean to eliminate the government's capacity to measure anything that might stand in the way of unfettered resource extraction, while demonizing any who dare to speak out. How did we get to this position?  It is amazing to have descended so far, so fast, and with barely a whimper.
"And now scientists have lost access to the primary sources of scientific equipment and facilities operation (in the Experimental Lakes).  Everything about this is wrong, wrong, wrong."

 This is a lament by Jeremy Karr, a University of Ottawa biologist who runs the Canadian Facility for Ecoinformatics Research Biology.  He is certainly bemoaning a legitimate grievance.  How intelligent is it, after all, for Canada to cease operating its many facilities that prise open nature's secrets bit by bit, enabling us to understand elements of our environment and how best to mitigate the harm we do?

Yet, from ceasing to fund vital scientific investigative locations in the Arctic, to diminishing investments in the National Research Council laboratories, and shutting down various weather stations collecting vital international and national data to share with others around the world, Canada is engaging in procedures that will inevitably harm ourselves, and certainly do great harm to the reputation of the country.  Let alone withdraw important support from Canadian scientists to continue their scientific enquiries and research.

Now newly announced federal cuts to Ontario's Experimental Lakes Area (ELA), representing dozens of lakes that represented a venue whereby scientists were able to witness and learn how we should be responding to our interference in the natural process, threaten closure.  Northwestern Ontario's 46 lakes have represented a living laboratory for scientific investigation.

Fisheries and Oceans scientists were given the rare opportunity to study controlled pollution.  The scientifically prestigious international journal Science recognized the ELA as a unique and valuable resource.  Experiments on natural lakes enabled scientists to observe processes and reach conclusions that would be impossible to replicate in a laboratory.

All of the ELA staff have received the infamous "affected" letters. Federal funding is being cut, representing $600,000 from Department of Fisheries and Oceans for the basic station, and another $1.2 million in scientists' salaries.  University biologists who study there will be affected, as will foreign-based biologists who travel to Canada for that purpose, to take advantage of a resource not available anywhere else in the world.

On the immense scale of government spending on an annual basis, the relatively short sum of $2-million invested in the ELA is a pittance.  In "saving" that amount of money, this government decision is horribly ill-considered and utterly ruinous to the future of Canadian science in our natural surroundings.

"We are truly entering the scientific dark ages in Canada", is the dismal conclusion reached by David Schindler of the University of Alberta, formerly an ELA staff member.  And, it appears, with good reason.