For anyone who has followed the conservative movement, it comes as no surprise when they alter reality to match their own conclusions.<\/p>\n
However, the recent actions of dead eyed Canadian PM Stephen Harper go far beyond this. He is aggressively destroying historical documents in an attempt to prevent to double down on Canada’s fossil fuel economy<\/a>:<\/p>\n Back in 2012, when Canada’s Harper government announced that it would close down national archive sites<\/a> around the country, they promised that anything that was discarded or sold would be digitized first. But only an insignificant fraction of the archives got scanned, and much of it was simply sent to landfill or burned<\/a>. <\/span> The news source The Tyee<\/i> has what I think is the money quote on all of this:<\/p>\n “It must be about ideology. Nothing else fits,” said <\/span>[Dalhousie University biologist Jeff] <\/span>Hutchings. “What that ideology is, is not clear. Does it reflect that part of the Harper government that doesn’t think government should be involved in the very things that affect our lives? Or is it that the role of government is not to collect books or fund science? Or is it the idea that a good government is stripped down government? “<\/span> They are now literally<\/b> book burning fascist barbarians, and they are destroying our heritage (all of us, not just Canadians) to pursue an agenda of greed and spoil.<\/p>\n This is unalloyed evil.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For anyone who has followed the conservative movement, it comes as no surprise when they alter reality to match their own conclusions. However, the recent actions of dead eyed Canadian PM Stephen Harper go far beyond this. He is aggressively destroying historical documents in an attempt to prevent to double down on Canada’s fossil fuel …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1079,969,1003],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-evil","category-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186500"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186500\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Unsurprisingly, given the Canadian Conservatives’ war on the environment, the worst-faring archives were those that related to climate research. The legendary environmental research resources of the St. Andrews Biological Station in St. Andrews, New Brunswick are gone. The Freshwater Institute library in Winnipeg and the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Centre in St. John’s, Newfoundland: gone. Both collections were world-class. <\/span>
<\/span>An irreplaceable, 50-volume collection of logs from HMS Challenger’s 19th century expedition went to the landfill, taking with them the crucial observations of marine life, fish stocks and fisheries of the age. Update:<\/b> a copy of these logs survives overseas. <\/span>
<\/span>The destruction of these publicly owned collections was undertaken in haste. No records were kept of what was thrown away, what was sold, and what was simply lost. Some of the books were burned. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/span>Hutchings saw the library closures fitting a larger pattern of “fear and insecurity” within the Harper government, “about how to deal with science and knowledge.”<\/span>
<\/span>That pattern includes the gutting of the Fisheries Act, the muzzling of scientists, the abandonment of climate change research and the dismantling of countless research programs, including the world famous Experimental Lakes Area. All these examples indicate that the Harper government strongly regards environmental science as a threat to unfettered resource exploitation.<\/span>
<\/span>“There is a group of people who don’t know how to deal with science and evidence. They see it as a problem and the best way to deal with it is to cut it off at the knees and make it ineffective,” explained Hutchings.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n