Tuesday, March 13, 2012

More Harperite perversion plans for Canadian science

With the blind ideological wrecking ball role the Harperites are determined to play, it's easy to forget that their rampage extends to more than just their asinine law and order agenda or their threats to the CBC among other things.

Now, I have learned that they want to change the operational mandate of the National Research Council of Canada, the main government body that supports scientific research in this country; you might know it for their 1 PM time signal on CBC Radio.  Now, they want to orient the organization for more business oriented for applied sciences as a kind of a "concierge" service.

As much as Minister of State for Science and Technology Gary Goodyear claims this will not mean cutting back on pure "blue skies" research, can we really believe this from a government that has been accused of muzzling scientists and arbitrarily shutting down important research centers like that arctic atmospheric research centre?  I say of course not, this largely just their forcible molding another important government institution to serve their political ends and avoid any "inconvenient truths."

After all, the NRC could easily be forced to turn down environmental research under such a mandate as being economically detrimental. With big business increasingly unwilling to do applied research on their own money on the scale of the photocopier Xerox when it founded PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), which made major advances in computer technology, the NRC could essentially be forced to be corporate welfare instead.


Just another example of Harper perverting our institutions for their own ends instead.

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