toasterhaus replied to your post: What are the odds that TransCanada succeeds in securing permits for a pipeline to the Pacific instead of the proposed Keystone XL?
How can the government forbid scientists from talking to the media?
Environment Canada is an agency of the federal government. It deals with pollution regulation, renewable resource regulation, watercourses, weather forecasting, and lots of other stuff. Accordingly they hire lots of wildlife biologists and hydrologists and atmospheric chemists and so on.
If those scientists speak to the media on basically any policy question and aren’t doing so on a script expressly prepared by the Prime Minister’s media people for that purpose - they can be fired. If they’re asked for, say, their opinion on the impact of a 10% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by the Globe and Mail, and they give an opinion - yup, that’s grounds for termination right there.
So yeah. Welcome to our jingoistic petro-state!
