Mr. Speaker, to continue, he stated:
Destroying data is not just an ideological problem, it's also blatant fiscal mismanagement.
Government decisions must be based on evidence and facts, and the health of our democracy depends on an informed public. Unfortunately, this is a government engaged in an ongoing and deliberate attack on science. The Conservatives cynically and systematically gut funding for programs that may produce results that are not in line with Conservative ideology.
However, this motion is more than a condemnation of the government's war on science and scientists. It sets out a road map for how to move us beyond an attitude toward science resembling the medieval Inquisition to a modern acceptance that scientific freedom is at the root of progress. As Nobel Prize-winning scientist Sydney Brenner said, science is the best tool available for man to solve human problems.
The motion calls on the government to immediately rescind all rules and regulations that muzzle government scientists, consolidate government-funded or government-created science so that it is easily available to the public at large, and allow scientists to be able to speak freely on their work with limited and publicly stated exceptions.
The motion also calls on the government to create a chief science officer whose mandate would include ensuring that government science is freely available to those who are paying for it, namely, the public.
This motion offers me the opportunity to reflect on the way forward and on what a government committed to evidence-based policy and the importance of research and science could achieve. We must return to the practice of transparent and public advice to ministers. We have an ideal model for the way it could and should work in Canada in the form of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada. COSEWIC was created in 1977 as a result of a decision made at the conference of federal-provincial-territorial wildlife directors held in 1976.
In 2003, the Species at Risk Act established COSEWIC as an advisory body to ensure that wildlife species would be assessed using the best available scientific and aboriginal traditional knowledge. Under SARA, the Species at Risk Act, the Government of Canada is mandated to take COSEWIC's designations into consideration when establishing the legal list of wildlife species at risk. More important, COSEWIC's evaluation process is independent and transparent, and the results are reported to CESCC and the public.
The final decision rests in the hands of the minister, but the scientific recommendations are available to the public, and it is therefore up to the minister to explain to the public the reasons behind any decision not to follow the recommendations of those scientists exactly. There is no question that government decisions must be based on the full picture of science, economics, and common sense, but all of the information and context that go into that decision should be available to the public in a transparent way.
The science advisory board at Health Canada should be re-established, mandated not only to advise the minister on emerging issues of the day but also to strike the appropriate advisory panels. These panels must be free of bias and conflict and their advice seen as truly independent. They must be able to provide the best possible evidence-based policies, policies that Canadians will be able to trust.
There is a very important virtuous cycle of research, policy, and practice. It is imperative that governments understand that moving from research to policy requires informed knowledge translation that includes the public. To move from policy to practice means that governments have to have the political will to move the good evidence-based policy into practice in a timely fashion. Then it is very important that an evidence-based government would take that practice and move it back into better research questions by funding applied research in communities, in practice, to would allow us to ask better research questions, moving again to better policy and to better practice.
This virtuous cycle only moves properly when citizens are involved in the research and evidence that exist. It is only then that citizens can hold their government to account. It is only then that citizens can ask why this research is not in public policy, why this policy is not actually in practice, and whether that practice is being properly evaluated to ensure that governments are funding what works and are able to stop funding what does not work in this virtuous cycle.
With a truly informed public, that virtuous cycle moves rapidly, and that is what we are calling for today. We want the government to understand that by muzzling scientists, by not allowing researchers to speak to the public directly and their colleagues outside of government and around the world, it is depriving Canadians of the ability to truly hold their government to account. It is depriving parliamentarians of the ability to hold Parliament to account and to insist on policy that is evidence-based, not rooted and anchored in ideology.
Canadians deserve complete and open access to the information that is produced by scientists who are paid by them, the public. I urge all members to support this motion, and I thank my colleagues for having put this forward.