Mr. Speaker, I am very impressed that the Parliamentary Secretary is staying to answer all three questions.
Canadian government scientists are not free to talk about their research. I am not asking for government scientists to have the ability to talk about government policy. I realize this is something that ministers should be doing. However, we are talking about allowing Canadian government scientists to talk about their research. The most famous example was a fishery scientist who published a paper about salmon in the prestigious journal Science, which attracted a lot of international attention. Journalists wanted to talk to her to find out more and they were prohibited from doing so.
The government has in the past said that scientists go to conferences, give talks and they can ask questions during the talks. However, those conferences are not accessible to the average Canadian taxpayer. The way that science is accessible to the average Canadian taxpayer is that the journalists get that information and they translate and process that information for the general public. To transfer that information, to really understand something, there has to be a back and forth of questions and answers and more questions and more answers. That is why professors in school tell their students to ask questions, that there is no dumb question. That is why we have debates in the House of Commons and we do not simply lecture each other or read from notes and spout our party's talking points. That is why we have real debates, at least we aspire to have real debates in the House.
There are also resources that are wasted in enforcing the government's communications policy, which is behind this restriction of Canadian government scientists. A great example of that appeared recently when a journalist from the Ottawa Citizen tried to find out about a joint study between the NRC in Canada and NASA in the United States. The journalist found out, through an access to information request, that the reason why he did not get information from the Canadian government was that something like 11 staffers spent a whole day exchanging 50 pages of emails to try to figure out what to say to the journalist. In the end, they did not say very much. However, when the journalist phoned NASA, in 15 minutes he found out this was a study about how radar had trouble determining the amount of snowfall.
There is a certain efficiency in just speaking the plain truth. Here we are talking about a lot of taxpayer money being wasted, and I know the parliamentary secretary cares about not wasting taxpayer money.
In the United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration allows scientists to talk freely about their research. That was an administrative order that came out the United States administration, because open government is important to it and scientific integrity and public trust is important. That is why it has a policy that allows its scientists to speak freely about their own research, not policy.
Science journalists are fed up because they cannot get the information they need on a timely basis to do their job. It has also been argued by the government that it is not a big problem, that it is just a small number of pesky journalists complaining. I would remind the House that 40 years ago today there was an investigation of a burglary in the Watergate Hotel and a small number of pesky journalists defended democracy. That is why it is so important to give journalists the information they need to stand on guard for Canadian democracy.