Harper Hates Science And Your Baby

Or at least, that's how it's being framed not unlike how the left went completely unhinged during the Bush years. It's now Harper's turn.

Look, Harper isn't my cup of tea. It doesn't seem as though he's much for this loyalty thing but this cutting back nonsense is missing the point.

Cutting programs doesn't automatically equate to "bad."

The truth is the left can be every bit as dogmatic as Harper as they allege.

From Huffington a refreshing counter-point from J.J. McCullough:

"...The idea that Canada's current government has been waging a nihilistic jihad against tax-funded scientific research has long been one of the most beloved shibboleths of the Canadian left, I assume because it allows them to unload so many fun anti-Conservative slurs: ignorant, ideological, dogmatic, etc. Silence of the Labs certainly had no shortage of snippy one-liners: the Harperites were said to be unleashing "a bitter conflict between ideology and knowledge" and a "sacrifice of scientific knowledge on the alter of political expediency" spawned from their "obsessive political focus on the economy" at the expense of all things clean and clever. (It should go without saying that these words were spoken amid lots of scary music and footage of lights being turned off.)

Arriving at such extreme conclusions is not easy. Between 2006 and 2011, after all, the Harper administration increased federal funding for science and technology every year  --  a $9 billion spike, according to the braggy "Investing in World-Class Research and Innovation" chapter of Minister Flaherty's 2013 budget. Even following a slight dip post-2011, overall annual funding still remain billions higher than in the Liberal years, and as Minister Rempel angrily reminded a Twitter troll the other day, the Conservatives are still funnelling tonnes of tax dollars to a vast assortment of science-themed bureaucracies across the land, many of which they themselves founded.

Canada likewise ranks near the top of the G7 on a host of OCED science-funding related indicators, including percentage of gross domestic expenditures on research and development financed by government (third) and percentage performed by public universities (first).

Indeed, if anything, the government is simply struggling to match supply with demand in a country's that's among the most science-obsessed on earth. As Maclean's science blogger Julia Belluz noted in an even-handed column on the "Scientists Vs. Harper" controversy a couple years ago, one of the underlying roots of this whole conflict is that "there are now more scientists working in Canada -- a 23 per cent increase between 2002 and 2007 -- so competition for dollars is now more intense...."

Funny what a little facts can do and less reading of Allan Greg.