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Comment by themstheones | Hacker News Reader

This is a pretty thinly veiled attempt to defund climate science.

"... at the NSERC conference this week. It's crazy. They don't want to fund research unless it is run in collaboration with an industry partner. It's killing primary research and making all of the scientists crazy."

-- My coworker

If true, why veil it at all? Why not just defund it alone? The government reserves the right to not fund whatever it wants to. This will have an awful lot of collateral damage. So much so that I doubt the primary motivation was simply defunding climate science.

The Cons have never been overly concerned about collateral damage. (And have been stung by government-critical environmental findings enough times as-is.)

It's a government that's made it explicit that it does not govern on the basis of scientific findings.

I think it's fairly good proof of the religious nature of climate change that anything and everything somehow must relate to it in some grand conspiracy. Sorry for being hostile, but your claim is simply ridiculous.

The NRC already was a completely captive vehicle of the government. With this change they're essentially trying to make it more self-sustaining by moving it to contract research, which obviously includes a lot of renewable energy research, health sciences, etc.

Such a change (to funded "partner" research) is short-sighted and foolish, but it's all about dollars. It isn't a "veiled attempt" at anything, yet is an obvious, open attempt at reducing costs.

The current government in Canada has been pretty hostile towards science. Do a couple of searches on how government scientists are no longer allowed to talk to the public in Canada.

I'm very aware of the common narrative. In Canadian politics, the left acts very much like the right does in the US -- hysterical stretches of the truth that would make Nixon blush, so long as it achieves the goal. There is zero ability to have a rational discussion about the Conservative party with these people because everything has to fit in laughably binary buckets, every actor turned into a caricature. It is embarrassing.

Depends on what you mean by the 'left.' The NDP? The Liberals? The Green Party?

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