Peter Calamai, founder, Canadian Science Writers' Association and the Science Media Centre of Canada

Shackled mandate prevents CCA from having greater impact, higher public profile

By Peter Calamai

These are tense times at the Council of Canadian Academies in Ottawa. The Council has spent most of the $30 million endowment it received when established in 2005 by the science-aware Liberal government of Paul Martin. It is running on financial fumes and there is little indication that the delayed federal budget will bring salvation. Already staff have been cut.

Even loyal readers of RE$EARCH MONEY may be hazy about what the Council does. It appoints panels of experts to investigate and analyze matters of public concern with a significant scientific component. To be able to draw on the endowment, however, the Council can only launch such "assessments" when the request originates with a federal department or agency and has been approved by the Minister of Industry.

Further assuring a low public profile for the Council is the stipulation that its assessments may not offer advice, but only analysis. Misleadingly, the URL for the Council of Canadian Academies is www.scienceadvice.ca.

Since September 2006, the Council has completed 27 formal assessments — one each in 2006 and 2007, three each in 2008 and 2009, two in 2010, one in 2011, four in 2012, five in 2013 and seven in 2014, for an average of slightly more than three a year. The founding agreement stipulates that the federal government may submit no more than five assessment topics a year.

But the key issue is not so much seemingly low productivity (especially taking into account the Industry Canada choke point) but meagre evidence of real world impact from the assessments in influencing policy or practice. Under a heading of "The Impact of Assessments", the "science advice" website lists five — S&T in Canada (2006), managing groundwater and business strategy for innovation (both 2009), research integrity (2010) and deciding on research priorities (2012).

These five expert panels all benefitted from world-class chairs who demanded prose that would have been at home in the science and technology section of The Economist. (Insiders say that groundwater chair Jim Bruce had a major hand in the drafting, something rare in most Council assessments.)

Yet what of the remaining 22 completed assessments? Are readers of RE$EARCH MONEY even aware that the CCA last year released assessments about such important matters as future policing models and improving medicines for children. In the continuing sturm und drang over shale gas have you heard even a mention of the 2014 CCA report into the environmental impacts of shale gas extraction.

Go further back in time and the profile of Council assessments becomes not merely low but subterranean even among science policy wonks. Hands up anyone who has a clue about the key points in CCA reports about topics such as taxonomy, animal health, Arctic research, conducted energy weapons or aboriginal food security.

Circumscribed mandate

The overarching problem is the no-recommendations shackles clamped on the Council from the outset. A few clever chairs (assisted by ingenious program directors) have been able to fashion reports where the analysis points definitively to inescapable recommendations. But far too few Council reports state clearly what has been done wrong and by whom, plus how to proceed to set matters right.

A contributing factor is that most of the reports are written to impress the experts in the contracting departments or agencies, instead of being aimed at the wider science-engaged public. (Disclosure: I unsuccessfully made such arguments when under contract to the Council for the reports on animal health and women in research.)

Such problems are manifested in the August 2014 report Science Culture: Where Canada Stands. This expert panel benefitted from the leadership of Arthur Carty, now executive director of the Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology and a former national science advisor and president of the National Research Council.

Members included my friend Jay Ingram, a multi-talented science communicator, Seed magazine founder Adam Bly, the University of Calgary's Edna Einsiedel who pioneered surveys of public understanding of science in Canada, and from the University of Michigan, Jon Miller, whose research on scientific literacy is recognized world-wide.

And yet this stellar cast produced a curate's egg of a report, good in a few parts but decidedly bad in most others. For starters I can picture Ingram and Bly holding their noses at the report's meandering and obtuse prose. The weakest section of the report is that devoted to informal science engagement and learning in Canada which extols the value of lecturing to the public on science topics, an approach that has been utterly discredited. As an editorial in the January 30 Science states: "There needs to be a conversation, not a lecture."

The subsection on print journalism bemoans the absence of a dedicated science section in Canada's top 11 circulation newspapers. That's the wrong metric. Those sections are ghettos, read predominately by people already interested in science. Science stories have the potential to reach several times more readers when in the front section, preferably pages 1 or 3, or the weekend in-depth sections. That's where Anne McIlroy, the Globe's former science writer, told a Carleton class she always aimed, as I did for 10 years at the Toronto Star.

Most disappointing is the report's claim that science knowledge among Canadian adults has improved between 1989 and 2013 (p. 76), a finding that played prominently in media coverage. Yet there is no indication of a standard statistical tool, regression analysis, being applied to winkle out how much of the supposed improvement is explained by the higher educational level of the 2013 population. A statistician with extensive experience with such data sets told me that the answer is "almost all."

We have the right to expect more intellectual rigour from a report on science culture by the Council of Canadian Academies.

Veteran newspaper reporter Peter Calamai is a founder of the Canadian Science Writers' Association and the Science Media Centre of Canada. In December 2014 he was appointed a member of the Order of Canada "for his achievements as a science journalist and for his contributions to the cause of literacy."