MILLERTIME
Member
Article rank 27 Jul 2011 Times Colonist MARGARET MUNRO Postmedia News
Gag order silences Nanaimo scientist
New research helps explain why salmon stocks are dwindling
VANCOUVER — Top bureaucrats in Ottawa have muzzled a leading fisheries scientist whose discovery could help explain why salmon stocks have been crashing off the B.C. coast, according to documents obtained by Postmedia News.
The documents show the Privy Council Office, which supports the Prime Minister’s Office, stopped Kristi Miller from talking about one of the most significant discoveries to come out of a federal fisheries lab in years.
Science, one of the world’s top research journals, published Miller’s findings in January. The journal considered the work so significant it notified “over 7,400” journalists worldwide about Miller’s “Suffering Salmon” study.
Science told Miller to “please feel free to speak with journalists.” It advised reporters to contact Diane Lake, a media officer with the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans in Vancouver, “to set up interviews with Dr. Miller.”
Miller heads a $6-million salmon-genetics project at the federal Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo.
The documents show major media outlets were soon lining up to speak with Miller, but the Privy Council Office said no to the interviews.
The office also nixed a Fisheries Department news release about Miller’s study, saying the release “was not very good, focused on salmon dying and not on the new science aspect,” according to documents obtained by Postmedia News under the Access to Information Act.
Miller is still not allowed to speak publicly about her discovery and the Privy Council Office and Fisheries Department defend the way she has been silenced.
But observers say it is indefensible and more evidence of the way the government is undermining its scientists.
“There is no question in my mind it’s muzzling,” said Jeffrey Hutchings, a senior fisheries scientist at Halifax’s Dalhousie University.
“When the lead author of a paper in Science is not permitted to speak about her work, that is suppression,” he said.
The Privy Council Office and the Fisheries Department said Miller has not been permitted to discuss her work because of the Cohen Commission, a judicial inquiry created by the prime minister to look into declines of the Fraser River sockeye. She is expected to appear before the commission in late August.
“Fisheries and Oceans Canada is conscious of the requirement to ensure that our conduct does not influence the evidence or course of the inquiry,” department spokeswoman Melanie Carkner said in a written statement.
Hutchings doesn’t buy it, saying he finds it “inconceivable that the Cohen Commission would have viewed the communication of brand new scientific information as somehow interfering with its proceedings.”
To Hutchings, the muzzling of Miller is “all about control.”
The government released 762 pages of documents relating to the Miller study to Postmedia News. Many passages and pages were blacked out before they were released.
The documents give a glimpse of the way media strategists, communication specialists and officials control and script what government scientists say — or, in Miller’s case, do not say —about their research.
The documents show the Fisheries Department wanted to publicize Miller’s study, which raises the spectre of a mysterious virus killing huge numbers of Fraser River salmon before they reach their spawning grounds.
In November, two months before Miller’s findings were published in Science, Fisheries Department communications staff started preparing “media lines.”
The lines said Miller’s findings “demonstrate unequivocally that salmon are entering the river in a compromised state and that survivorship can be predicted based on gene expression more than 200 kilometres before salmon reach the river.”
Gag order silences Nanaimo scientist
New research helps explain why salmon stocks are dwindling
VANCOUVER — Top bureaucrats in Ottawa have muzzled a leading fisheries scientist whose discovery could help explain why salmon stocks have been crashing off the B.C. coast, according to documents obtained by Postmedia News.
The documents show the Privy Council Office, which supports the Prime Minister’s Office, stopped Kristi Miller from talking about one of the most significant discoveries to come out of a federal fisheries lab in years.
Science, one of the world’s top research journals, published Miller’s findings in January. The journal considered the work so significant it notified “over 7,400” journalists worldwide about Miller’s “Suffering Salmon” study.
Science told Miller to “please feel free to speak with journalists.” It advised reporters to contact Diane Lake, a media officer with the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans in Vancouver, “to set up interviews with Dr. Miller.”
Miller heads a $6-million salmon-genetics project at the federal Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo.
The documents show major media outlets were soon lining up to speak with Miller, but the Privy Council Office said no to the interviews.
The office also nixed a Fisheries Department news release about Miller’s study, saying the release “was not very good, focused on salmon dying and not on the new science aspect,” according to documents obtained by Postmedia News under the Access to Information Act.
Miller is still not allowed to speak publicly about her discovery and the Privy Council Office and Fisheries Department defend the way she has been silenced.
But observers say it is indefensible and more evidence of the way the government is undermining its scientists.
“There is no question in my mind it’s muzzling,” said Jeffrey Hutchings, a senior fisheries scientist at Halifax’s Dalhousie University.
“When the lead author of a paper in Science is not permitted to speak about her work, that is suppression,” he said.
The Privy Council Office and the Fisheries Department said Miller has not been permitted to discuss her work because of the Cohen Commission, a judicial inquiry created by the prime minister to look into declines of the Fraser River sockeye. She is expected to appear before the commission in late August.
“Fisheries and Oceans Canada is conscious of the requirement to ensure that our conduct does not influence the evidence or course of the inquiry,” department spokeswoman Melanie Carkner said in a written statement.
Hutchings doesn’t buy it, saying he finds it “inconceivable that the Cohen Commission would have viewed the communication of brand new scientific information as somehow interfering with its proceedings.”
To Hutchings, the muzzling of Miller is “all about control.”
The government released 762 pages of documents relating to the Miller study to Postmedia News. Many passages and pages were blacked out before they were released.
The documents give a glimpse of the way media strategists, communication specialists and officials control and script what government scientists say — or, in Miller’s case, do not say —about their research.
The documents show the Fisheries Department wanted to publicize Miller’s study, which raises the spectre of a mysterious virus killing huge numbers of Fraser River salmon before they reach their spawning grounds.
In November, two months before Miller’s findings were published in Science, Fisheries Department communications staff started preparing “media lines.”
The lines said Miller’s findings “demonstrate unequivocally that salmon are entering the river in a compromised state and that survivorship can be predicted based on gene expression more than 200 kilometres before salmon reach the river.”
Is this the CIA, KGB, MI6 covert operations were talking about here all blacked out - or the susposedly above board, actions of a Federal PUBLIC Service staff charged with protecting our wild salmon stocks (yeah right, that's what it is supposed to be, but very sadly isn't!)
