montreal

Three Canadian scientists claim that political and bureaucratic interference in fisheries science has compromised the government's efforts to sustain stocks of Atlantic cod and Pacific salmon.

Jeffrey A. Hutchings of Dalhousie University's biology department, Carl Walters of the University of British Columbia's fisheries centre, and Richard L. Haedrich of the biology department at Memorial University of Newfoundland claim that the administrative framework linking science with management suppresses scientific uncertainty and obscures scientists' differences of opinion.

They propose replacing it with a politically independent organization of fisheries scientists. They also suggest that all scientific information about fish stocks should be released to the public at the same time as it is presented to the fisheries department, so that the public can evaluate management decisions based on that information.

But the scientists' ideas have been dismissed by officials from the fisheries department. The department's deputy director, William Rowat, claims that the comments are based on innuendo and misrepresentation, and are part of a vendetta against the department, its scientists and its managers.

The scientists' arguments appeared last month in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, published by the National Research Council of Canada, under the title “Is scientific inquiry incompatible with government information control?”

To back up their claims that a political ‘spin’ is being placed on scientific results, the authors refer to several incidents in which they allege that government fisheries reports excluded scientific information contrary to the official line. They claim that the government, which denies that overfishing is the primary cause of present stock collapses, omitted references to conclusions that overfishing had caused stock decline in a 1995 report for Newfoundland groundfish.

Scientific information was also selectively excluded in the 1995 Stock Status Report on Gulf of St Lawrence groundfish, say the scientists. The original draft of the document said that seal predation or environmental conditions were unlikely to be responsible for cod mortality trends from 1985-87. But this statement was removed from the published version, contrary to scientific advice, the authors claim.

They also allege that scientists have been ordered not to discuss politically sensitive matters — such as overfishing — in public, “irrespective of the scientific basis, and publication status, of the scientist's concerns”.

One scientist who admitted in an interview with a journalist in 1995 that east coast fish stocks had collapsed from overfishing and “had nothing to do with the environment, nothing to do with seals” — as some fishermen had claimed — was officially reprimanded for not giving a balanced perspective and for disagreeing with the Newfoundland Stock Status Report. Yet “these comments were consistent with much of the research that had been … published in peer-reviewed journals”, the authors say.

The authors claim that inappropriate government influence on fisheries science also extended to testimony given by scientists in the courts. They quote one scientist who described his confusion when told how to behave as an expert witness in a case involving salmon affected by a dam built by the aluminium smelting company Alcan.

The scientist wrote in 1986 that at the meeting the director-general in the fisheries department had instructed staff to support the minister's position, while adhering to the scientific advice. “I find it impossible to do both,” he wrote.

William Doubleday, director-general, science, in the fisheries department, has criticized the comments as “not the usual scientific debate” but “an attack on an organization and the people that were working in it”.

Doubleday says the article contains “factual errors, misrepresentations, and very selective quotes”. He says the department is preparing a rebuttal, but that the authors have also been invited to participate in an open forum to debate the management of science later this summer.

But the former editor of the journal, David Cook, who gave up the post last month, defended publication of the article by suggesting it would lead to “broad exposure” and “candid debate”.