Reaction to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s recent appointment of Preston Manning to the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA) was, for the most part, adverse and predictable. The promotion of Manning to this scientific advisory body has been slammed on the grounds that (a) it is a patronage appointment, pure and simple, (b) Manning lacks the prerequisite scientific expertise and (c) his well-known fundamentalist religious beliefs place him at odds with the scientific community. Or as one headline put it, “Preston Manning is to science as KFC is to chicken.” All this may be true, but at the same time, it’s just possible that Harper has unwittingly delivered himself a Trojan horse that he may yet come to regret.
The mandate of the CCA is to provide “an independent and authoritative… way to build public confidence that policy and regulatory decisions are being based on broadly accepted scientific knowledge and evidence.” As such, anyone who sits on the CCA should have at least a passing knowledge and understanding of contemporary scientific issues and debate.
At first glance, it seems all three major criticisms of Manning’s appointment are valid. However, the matter is not so clear-cut. First, this clearly is a patronage appointment. The history of Canadian politics is inseparable from the practise of partisan patronage, but Harper came to power on the promise of cleaning house. He has since reneged on this promise, as is well documented, but, ironically, this fact alone means there is no special reason to single out Manning’s appointment.
Second, is Manning unqualified to hold any key position as scientific advisor? With a BA in economics, he hardly possesses an educational background in the hard sciences. True, he did serve as critic for Science and Technology while in opposition to the federal Liberals, and has since taught a course titled Public Policy and the Genetic Revolution as a “distinguished visitor” at the University of Toronto, but this remains a slim basis of relevant expertise.
Third, what about Manning’s religious values? Surely these should preclude him from holding any position of influence in scientific matters? For example, he has argued on his website that, “There must be a higher notion than science alone… that can guide scientific research and endeavour…. One of the candidates is ‘faith’ — religious faith — that there are universal and transcendent moral principles, which ought to govern us in addition to the principles of physics, chemistry and biology to which we are all subject.”
Similarly, last summer Manning launched an attack in the pages of the Globe and Mail on those (notably self-confessed atheist Richard Dawkins) guilty of leading a “modern inquisition in the name of science to root out… ‘the mind virus of religion.”’ Shouldn’t this belief alone discredit his recent appointment?
Well, perhaps all of these criticisms are on target. However, any problem with science itself within the Harper government goes well beyond Manning’s appointment to the CCA. As well, it might be an unlikely solution to those same problems.
In February this year, the British journal Nature ran an editorial under the title “Science in Retreat,” in which it attacked the Harper government’s poor record on science. “Science has long faced an uphill battle for recognition in Canada,” it argued, “but the slope became steeper when the Conservative government was elected in 2006.” In particular, Nature singled out Harper’s retreat from the Kyoto Accord, his long-held skepticism on climate change and his recent decision to abolish the position of federal scientific advisor. This last point is especially important, for it helps explain how and why Manning came to secure his recent appointment in the first place.
Under Paul Martin’s Liberals, chemist Arthur Carty was appointed independent National Science Adviser (NSA), with a mandate to provide non-partisan advice on science and technology. Last January, Harper pre-empted Carty’s resignation and replaced the NSA with the new Science, Technology and Innovation Council (STIC), a body accountable to Industry Minister Jim Prentice. And sure enough, it was Prentice who told reporters of Manning’s placement on the CCA, itself a sub-committee of STIC.
What this means, then, is that any scientific advice the present government receives must come through the Ministry of Industry, whose interests, clearly, will not always (if ever) be at one with those of scientific inquiry. Manning, despite his stated limitations, has, in fact, long argued for a clear and greater commitment from the federal government on scientific matters. In his autobiographical Think Big, for example, he claimed that “science analogies and scientific reasoning are almost totally absent from the speeches of our parliamentarians” and that “Parliament itself has no mechanism… for bringing science effectively to bear on its deliberations or decisions.”
With this in mind, Manning has elsewhere set out various measures for rectifying the dearth of scientific knowledge in Canada. Among these, he has promoted the creation of a new federal science department, the appointment of a “scientist general” to provide MPs with necessary scientific expertise, the election of more politicians with a scientific background “to enable them to ask relevant scientific questions in question period” and an end to political patronage appointments to such organizations as Atomic Energy of Canada.
For any of this to happen depends on Manning being a man of his word. Compared to the cronies and turncoats who currently occupy the front bench of Harper’s government, I suspect he might be. I hope so, for the future of science in Canada depends on it.
David Bright has published widely on Canadian social, labour and criminal justice history. He teaches history and politics at Niagara College, Ontario.
