Kristi Miller is just the latest in a long line of Harper silencing any dissent, let alone criticism.
In early 2008, the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper fired Linda Keen as head of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. At the time, then-Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn refused to cite examples of Keen having failed to fulfill her duties, making it clear that the firing had nothing to do with fulfilling her role as head of an arm’s-length watchdog agency and everything to do with embarrassing the government with her comments about the handling of the crisis with the Chalk River nuclear facility.
The Keen affair was one of the more high-profile examples of the Harper government muzzling input from public servants for political reasons. The matter involving Richard Colvin — the career diplomat who blew the whistle in the Afghan detainees affair — is another of at least a dozen examples that have been cited in the media.
This week we learned of yet another example: Kristi Miller, a fisheries biologist at the Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo, has been barred from speaking to the media about a $6 million study into salmon genetics that could help explain why West Coast salmon stocks have been crashing over the past couple of decades. The journal Science published Miller’s work in January, but the Privy Council Office, which supports the Prime Minister’s Office, has refused to let Miller speak to the media about it.
