Canadian scientists protest gag order, go straight to public with own website

It seems there's some tension playing out between whether these are the government's scientists who do research and report back to the government; or the public's scientists, paid by the government, but doing research and reporting it directly to the public.

In the first model, the government asks its scientists to research something, they come back with an internal whitepaper, and it decides when, how, and if to report that publicly, controlling the external message. Similar to how staff scientists at a company operate. In the second model, publishing and media-interview decisions are made at a fairly low level, sometimes with individual scientists directly publishing results without managerial review. Management may still run strategic PR campaigns highlighting certain things, but they're usually in addition to, rather than instead of, the original release of findings.

NASA responded to a similar controversy in 2006 by explicitly saying that NASA scientists can talk to the media about scientific research or their personal opinions without prior approval, as long as they're disseminating unclassified information and are clear that they're speaking in a personal capacity (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03...).

The protest and website were set up by the union government scientists are obliged to join (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Institute_of_the_P...), not an actual group of scientists. That's quite a bit different than a group of actual scientists risking their funding by taking a stand. Scientists are just one component of the union's membership, by the way - they represent all government employees who have professional designations.

Unions in Canada are uniformly hostile to the Canadian Conservative government (although, interestingly, their membership largely is not, especially in the industrial unions). That is not to say that the union's point of view is not valid. But this is certainly not a Bush-era-esque case of the scientific community standing up to government hostility to science.

These people get more audacious at every turn, and as time goes by I find it harder and harder to believe they're doing this out of ignorance rather than malice or greed.