Peter Kirby
Dear editor:
We praise the federal government’s commitment to restore funding to the Experimental Lakes Area (ELA).
This is good news for science and for the environment. The ELA is the world’s leading freshwater living laboratory, helping to make Canada a world leader in protecting the natural world.
It also will continue to provide employment for generations of scientists, scientists-in-training, and high school students—from Northwestern Ontario and across the globe.
It is worth remembering the global outcry over the Harper government’s decision to refuse to continue ELA funding. Israeli scientists said the government was “stamping out the ability of the world scientific community to conduct the research required to formulate sound environmental policies.”
The Israeli scientists were referring to the ELA studies that led to removing phosphates from detergents and curbing acid rain.
Ontario and Manitoba played the hero, and along with private donors and the new ELA operator, the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) came to the rescue.
ELA supporters will never forget the dumbfounding intransigence of the Harper government, and the inability of successive cabinet ministers or anyone in the Conservative caucus to speak out and reverse course.
ELA supporters also remember that the Harper government shuttered libraries and de-funded two other world-class research programs. One was the marine contaminants program, led by Dr. Peter Ross, who told us about toxins contaminating orca whales.
The other was the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Lab (PEARL), the furthest northern Arctic research lab in the world, led by Dr. Tom Duck of Dalhousie University—a scientist who worked on the LIDAR scanning program sent to search for water on Mars.
The seven Fisheries libraries closed include the Eric Marshall Library of the Freshwater Institute at the University of Manitoba and the St. Andrews Biological Station in St. Andrews, N.B.
Yes, restoring federal funding to ELA is great news. We are glad; but Canadians should remain vigilant to ensure the damage done to environmental science is never repeated.
(Signed),
Peter Kirby
Kenora, Ont.
Editor’s note: The other signatories include Pamela Kellaway and Jim Johnson of Kenora, Anne Saltel of Sioux Lookout, and Kathy Boone and Jo-Anne Bridgwater of Dryden.
