How the Harper Government Committed a Knowledge Massacre | Hacker News Reader

How the Harper Government Committed a Knowledge Massacre

huffingtonpost.ca

98 pointstriplesec52 comments

This phenomenon is certainly not limited to the Harper government, nor to Canada. Just the other day, Franklin county, North Carolina destroyed boxes of priceless 19th century records, including court records, by bringing them to an animal shelter to be burned.

Photo from Twitter: http://pic.twitter.com/ZjEPcajo8U

Here's the unbelievable part: the local historical society and local genealogists volunteered to re-house and rescue the records FOR FREE and the county still said no, refused to let them examine the records, and destroyed them anyway!

Full story here: http://stumblingintheshadowsofgiants.wordpress.com/2013/12/2...

Not exactly the "full story" when it omits the facts that support differing conclusions. That's sort of the opposite of "full story".

Some moderating details:

* Documents were damaged by a mold that is hazardous to health

* State archivist claims the documents were of "low historical value"

* Archivist claims some were confidential, and couldn't be legally released to 3rd party

http://www.wral.com/historians-lament-destruction-of-frankli...

Those "moderating details" are inane. The Heritage Society was willing to take the risk of storing and possibly digitizing the documents, some of which were moldy and some of which were not. Indeed, members of the Heritage Society were the ones providing the initial manpower (and masks and sanitizer) to clean out the building basement where they were found, including the broken furniture and muck. If they're willing to take documents in that condition, having already seen it first hand, why should the state be paternalistic about it?

Furthermore, some of the records were clearly NOT of limited value:

"The following is a description of the early investigation, accounted by Ms. Torrent of Franklin County Heritage Society; “Immediately we found Chattel Mortgages from the 1890′s, court dockets from post civil war to prohibition, delayed birth certificate applications with original supporting documents (letters from Grandma, bible records, birth certificates, etc), county receipts on original letterhead from businesses long extinct, poll record books, original school, road and bridge bonds denoting the building of the county, law books still in their original paper wrappings, etc., etc. etc. The list goes on and on. Our original feelings of shock that the records were there and in such bad condition led to feelings of joy that they were still there and that someone had thought to retain them for us to discover so many years later.

Each book or box opened produced a new treasure. A letter, stamped and in the original envelope, from a Franklin County soldier serving in France during the First World War asking the court to be sure his sister and his estate was looked after while he was away. A naturalization paper from the late 1890s for an immigrant from Russia escaping the tyranny of the Czar. A document from County Commissioners in the early years of road building requesting another county repair their road as it entered the county. Lists of county employees and what their wages were in 1900. A court document paying the court reporter who took the depositions in the “Sweat Ward” case, (Ward beheaded a man in the 1930s and later became the last man to be lynched in the county). Postcards, county bills, audits, cancelled checks, newspaper clippings, store ads from long gone businesses. Boxes and boxes of court cases covering the years of prohibition, a docket from an individual accused of running a “baudy house” within the city limits, a photo tucked now and then inside a book, one of the courthouse unseen since the 1920s. Again, nothing was in any order and many of the boxes were combinations of records from many decades."

What an amazing, amazing collection of documents! But sorry, it's all ashes now.

"[Diane Taylor] Torrent said she wishes the records were simply relocated[..]" That is one ironic surname right there.

Take this article with a grain of salt. You normally can't quietly and quickly shut these types of things down. It would be on the CBC and especially something like this would be very hard to pull off. Here is why:

1. Obvious environmental concerns about oceans and fisheries.

2. The conservative base is pro-government regulation of fisheries.

3. The conservative base is sentimental, and destroying first copies of anything would piss them off.

4. Newfoundlanders (man is it hard not to write "Newfies") gave up a shit ton of prosperity after joining Canada by having the government come in and regulate their fish stocks. (To be fair, they didn't have much choice. If they had kept going there would be nothing left in 5 to 10 years. No I'm not exaggerating it was fucking bad.) For the conservative government to do something that widely flies in the face of that would be to piss off an entire province.

5. The government is under a lot of flack by gutting the census and by muzzling federal employed scientists, this would make voters across Canada balk.

6. Canada is fighting off illegal Chinese and Portuguese fishing boats. These libraries contain information that is useful if we're ever going to get reparations from them.

7. No clear motive for doing so. It isn't like big oil has made a giant spill and the conservatives are trying to cover up the environmental damage or anything.

8. I fail to see this being reported on the CBC, and they would be all over this.

Regarding 4 (Newfoundland): the Harper government pretty much pisses off the entire provice on a weekly basis. Harper's conservative base is out west, Newfoundlanders certainly don't think much of him. Peter Penashue was the only Conservative MP voted in here in the last election, and he's gone now, thankfully.

Those are all good reasons not to do this. But "nobody smart would do that" doesn't refute the reporting. You could come up with a similar list of common-sense reasons not to start wars in the middle east but in the US we do that like every 5 years.

Yes, we might call this the "no one would ever fight a land war in Asia" fallacy.

Take this article with a grain of salt.

Better yet, take everything from huffingtonpost.ca with a grain of salt. They make Fox News look unbiased by comparison...

If I understand it correctly, Canada had 3 elections in the span of 5 years, and Harper was elected as the prime minster 3 times in a row. To be more precise, the Conservatives had 2 minority governments and 1 majority government, with Harper being the leader of the Conservatives.

Sorry, but just like the Bush era, by voting someone in again and again, and knowing his agenda, it basically legitimizes anything he does. I think Canadians already knew who he was and his behavior, and to imagine him getting voted in 3 times in a row, well, this isn't on Harper, it's on the Canadians for voting him in.

It's a real shame though that Harper is such a tyrant that he would allow this destruction of historical data. That's not someone I would want as my leader, and I hope in the next election his party gets voted out. But for that to happen there has to be a better alternative, and apparently so far there hasn't been one.

As a Canadian voter over the last 5 years this fact is really frustrating.

Everyone knows he sucks; Other parties get a lot of hype, and the future seems bright.

But when the results come in, Conservatives always win.

I just don't get it man.

You don't get it?

Split vote on the center/left (liberal, ndp, green), and liberal leaders who lack intellect or charisma or both.

Exactly... where ~40% of the pop vote leads to a majority government & incontestable omnibus bills.

> To be more precise, the Conservatives had 2 minority governments and 1 majority government ...

And all it took was some country-wide election fraud[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Canadian_federal_election_...

all it took was some country-wide election fraud

That's a bit of a stretch. A federal court found that electoral fraud had taken place in 6 out of 308 ridings, and did not affect the outcome of the election in any of those ridings. Meanwhile 12 ridings would have needed to change hands to change the outcome of the election.

If I cheat at a couple of questions in an exam; but I would have had the exam anyway with the others, do I get punished or is it fine ?

If I match-fix a game in a sport championship but I would have won the whole thing anyway because I beat the next opponents, do I get punished or is it fine ?

When a group of politicians ask to be in control of a country and to be trusted with all of its power and responsibilities, and they have proven to be lying and cheating to those they represent, is it ok because the end result wasn't affected ?

I realize the analogies there are not all that good, but honestly whether or not it did have an impact doesn't matter, the fact is that it did happen.

I'm not saying that the people responsible shouldn't be punished (if we ever figure out who was behind it...), just that it's inaccurate to claim that the fraud was responsible for the Conservatives getting elected. The Conservatives won those elections because Canadian voters collectively decided that the Conservatives should win.

The article mentions reports of misleading calls in 247 ridings. Anyway, parties receive public funding based on the number of votes they receive, so any amount of election fraud is essentially stealing funding from another party.

> Anyway, parties receive public funding based on the number of votes they receive

This is false. The Conservatives put a stop to the per-party funding based on votes a long time ago.

> , so any amount of election fraud is essentially stealing funding from another party.

...but this was true when the elections happened. That's extra evil, I hadn't thought of it that way.

Apparently, it's gradually being reduced until next year. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_political_financing_in_...

Yeah, we,say the same thing about Obama here in the US.

If I understand correctly, they have a system where the one getting the biggest amount of vote wins, even if it's not even half of the total, and the other side was cut between two parties (+ the historic quebec party), and the conservatives won with a quarter of the votes. And even if you could force these other parties to merge in order to oppose a single force, you end up in the usual "bi-party" situation which is still bad.

Without changing the whole thing, I don't understand why a system like this doesn't use a two turn election, unless one gets 50% of votes +1 in the first turn, a second turn happens when you can only vote for the two who had the more votes in the first turn. Conservatives would have never won in that situation, and that shows a huge problem in the system as-is. To take a poor analogy it asks people what is there choice between 3 shades of blue, or bright red. Most people agree on blue, but they differ on which exact shade of it, and red end up being chosen. If you had given the choice between blue and red, blue would have won absolutely because people who votes blue 1 were still very much in favor of blue 2 or blue 3 if the alternative was red.

Anyway, good luck to my friends in Canada

Not really.

What counts is how many MPs you get voted in, including the leader who's going to become the PM (see footnote). Let's say there's 100 counties, then you need to win 51 to have a majority government and you can basically pass any law because MPs tend to follow party lines. A minority government is when you get less than 51 MPs, in which case you always have to ally yourself with another party if you want to pass a law, or just form a coalition.

Note: If the leading party's leader isn't voted in, he can swap with another MP. It almost happened in Québec with Jean Charest.

Citizens ought to critically examine and assess the policies and practices of their government on an ongoing basis. To simply through up one's hands and say "there was an election, basically anything they do is legitimate" would be be slavish, immoral and absurd.

Of course one would hope and expect that a government would govern in alignment with it's agenda. It's hard to imagine that the core of the agenda was "badly manage a digitization process to destroy priceless knowledge while not really saving any money"

Presumably many of the people who voted for Harper will want the incompetent underling responsible dealt with, if for no other reason than to prevent the management of their actual agenda from coming into disrepute.

It's not quite that simple, though. The Harper government has cheated in most of those elections - they were caught in 2006 in the In and Out scandal, but it carried no punishment and so nobody cared. They are also recently (2011) accused of using robocalls targeted at (elderly/non-conservative) voters, posing as Elections Canada, and telling voters to go to the incorrect polling station. This definitely happened, and a few Conservatives are implicated, but to what extent it affected the elections and to what high level of power the order came from is being investigated still (by those appointed to Elections Canada by Stephen Harper).

Canada may have elected the Conservatives - or we may have never voted them in to power at all. It's tough to tell because they cheat in every election.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_and_Out_scandal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Canadian_federal_election_...

It does appear the Canadian conservatives have been learning from their brethren to the south: Karl Rove started the worst of such election abuses in the primaries against McCain in 2000.

My theory is it's the Baby Boomers nearing or now in retirement who are concerned about crime, pension, maybe even concerned about immigrants and oddly immigrants tend to be more conservative.

I also think it's deceptive that they call themselves the Conservative party I bet older people may think they are the Progressive Conservatives but they are not it's two radically different political parties with similar names. I consider the current Conservative (Party of Canada) to be nothing more than the Reform Party reborn, for those who don't know Reform was like Canada's Tea Party.

The last election was supposed to change it all it seemed like everyone wasn't going to vote Conservative and there was even a massive push to get young people to vote which seemed to be working. Then the bottom fell out and the Conservatives were not just voted back in but a majority! I say it's the Boomers.

by voting someone in again and again, and knowing his agenda, it basically legitimizes anything he does.

No, it doesn't. In all 3 of those elections more than 60% of the voters voted against Harper; he only won because there is only one right-wing party but 4 major left-wing parties.

Plurality voting is a sham.

Something to keep in mind is that Canada doesn't have a two party system. In the election that the conservatives gained a Majority, they only got ~40% of the vote. The majority of voters voted for 'not the Conservatives', but often split the vote.

Can the other parties who had the majority split between them form a coalition?

Coalition governments are possible in Canada, and have occurred before. In the case of the last election, the votes were split such that the Conservatives won a majority of seats.

It seems though that it only may be possible at election time. A few years prior to the election in which the Conservatives gained a minority, the Liberals and the NDP attempted to form a coalition government and the Governor General (The queen's representative in Canada) ended up proroguing parliament on Stephen Harper's behest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prorogation_in_Canada#History

Let's not forget that Canada is a large country, with an unevenly distributed population, and no party really serves the entire country well. I don't think it's just a matter of no other suitable candidate being available.

"Many scientists have compared the war on environmental science to the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe. Hutchings muses, "you look at the rise of certain political parties in the 1930s and have to ask how could that happen and how did they adopt such extreme ideologies so quickly, and how could that happen in a democracy today?"

Well of course it's just like the rise of fascism. And the "knowledge massacre" is, as the word denotes, essentially a genocide.

Thank you, HN.

Here, let me jog your memory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik

(Apologies, but Godwin's Law seems unavoidable in this context. Yes, here's a historic example of a no-shit Fascist party who fired lots of academics because of their ethnicity or their field of expertise and replaced them with a whole fabricated fake "science" that was ideologically acceptable to them. Note: burning libraries was explicitly part of the program.)

It's excessive to call Harper's government "fascist" (although Harper has prior form for hard-right politics: http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/home/Frontpage/2011/04/19/0... ), but this is indisputably a tactic used by fascist movements.

Holy shit I just got a reply from Charlie Stross!

Honestly, I don't see the parallel at all. GoC isn't trying to rewrite science: it's closing scientific institutions (minor ones) as part of budget cuts. Certainly it's not doing so out of a nationalist campaign against scientists of a specific race, which is what defines fascism (isn't it?). Arguably it's a politicization of science, if it's intended to suppress climate science; but that has nothing to do with fascism, it's just bad policy.

Fascism is a kind of authoritarianism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism It's extremely conservative but not necessarily racist.

It's also explicitly nationalist, according to that article. Regardless of the definition, I think it's obvious GoC closing some research stations is neither nationalist, espousing a supreme Canadian nation or Canadian race, nor authoritarian, "characterized by absolute or blind obedience to authority, as against individual freedom". That's just ludicrous. This is in the same league as equating socialized health care with communist totalitarianism: it's about 15 orders of magnitude of Godwin.

I'm not going to get into the fascism vs. not-at-all-fascism debate.

But there is something like nationalism at work here. You have the self-appointed champions of "real Canada" (Harper's base in the landlocked provinces) systematically undermining the knowledge and cultural capital of the Alien Other (the "weird" provinces that touch salt water, which for various reasons are all not quite "real Canada).

It's probably not fascism. But it's more than just bad policy. It's bad policy that consistently works out to the detriment of non-favored geographic, linguistic, and yes sometimes ethnic groups.

Yes, this. It's the equivalent of red state/blue state culture war politics in the USA, turned up to 8 or 9 (if not 11). It's also destroying research libraries that provide exhaustive raw data going back decades or centuries on the natural environment.

If you view Harper's constituents as the resource extraction industries, the destruction of this information is useful to them insofar as it deprives their opponents (the science-backed environmental lobby) of ammunition with which to oppose environment-degrading policies. With these libraries gone, much information is forever lost that could otherwise be used to build a coherent policy case opposing, e.g. tar sand extraction or other resource extraction businesses on environmental grounds.

Note that Stephen Harper is a member of an evangelical fundamentalist church that opposes environmentalism and denies anthropogenic climate change:

http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2012/03/26/Harper-Evangelical-Miss...

Whether what's at work is misguided tribalism, business-centric anti-environmentalism, religious fundamentalism, or something else, I hope everyone on HN can agree that destroying research libraries isn't a good foundation for evidence-based policy making in governance.

One principal description of Facism is the collusion of state and private corporate interests, to the point of one being subsumed under the other -- to the point where they become indistinguishable.

That does appear to be happening.

I'm reminded of some insight I gained a decade ago into the energy boom in Alberta, via an insider.

It was, both figuratively and, as the case were, literally, "fuck all to get yours".

I can easily extrapolate to the behaviour I see coming out of the Harper government.

Government is an extension of favoured private interests, to that lot.

Herr Harper also had coast guard bases eliminated that only cost a paltry amount per year and instead blew $20 million on his new weird ministry of religious freedom office nobody wants.

Sounds like the 21st century equivalent of book burning?

Control over knowledge and its dissemination is the primary weapon in the arsenal of the state. Military hardware comes after.

Could be, given that book burning was always more of a symbolic act to intimidate the supporters of the ideas contained in the book rather than just the act of destroying information. What could the purpose of burning records of environmental research centers and monitoring stations possibly be, for what's pocket change to a first world Government?

I have just read this, not being from Canada, but this Harper fellow seems to have an internal war with the institutions of the State in charge of the monitoring and protection of the environment and a budget deficit, so he went forth and dismembered the one in charge of water, despite what his advisers said, and what's common sense nowadays, that water ecology is in danger world wide after heavy abuse.

There are countless historical examples of the burning of books and cultural artifacts to suppress ideology and culture. The Catholic Church was a constant destroyer and perverter of opposition cultures for political power. A few examples are: Savonarola's Bonfire of the Vanities, the Spanish Inquisition, the conquest of the new world...

The total destruction of information is an act of political conquest. It eliminates the ability to use that information to form an opposition in the future and it delegitimizes any current opposition.

I'm seeing at least two other mentions in Canadian press:

http://o.canada.com/technology/environment/harper-government...

http://thetyee.ca/News/2013/12/09/Dismantling-Fishery-Librar...

The 'State' here means the Roman state or Babylonian state as some people describe it. The administrative and other publicly funded institutions of countries tend to be confused with the 'State' as they same name is used for both of them. The former is intertwined with and virtually controls the latter.

The 'State' was responsible for 2 world wars that killed close to 100 million people in addition to the 30 million or so killed by the Communists (in between the wars) and the 6 million killed in the Holocaust, and explained them under 'ideology'. And it is the same 'State' that is creating enmity and hatred between the 'Christians' and 'Muslims', as a pretext for future genocidal conflicts, a recent example of which is happening in the Central African Republic.

Confusing them is to suppose that groups of civil servants sitting around suddenly come up with the idea of killing millions of people and suddenly obtain the resources to accomplish those goals.

So whatever happened to calling the government to get a quote on record about this? Is "trust but verify" not known at HuffPo? Or is Canada on an extended holiday?

The former.

So data and information are irreversibly lost? In the Age of Internet?

Apparently so. It's not an article with a response from the government agents responsible or with first-hand detail on why or how the digitisation didn't happen, and why universities or a foundation didn't take on the load, or even the argument about what reasoning led to the closures in the first place, but if even half true, it's severe enough to be worth looking into.

Not all data & information created is meant to be saved till eternity.Plus, some of it comes with privacy implications, even when dealing with documents pertaining to the deceased.

Next best thing is to bury truth with falsehoods... http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/02/08/crtc-may-ease-ban-on-broa...

This story doesn't belong on HN IMO. But it is a pretty bad trend, among many others, that does deserve some attention.

In some ways, it's even easier for information to be lost in the digital age; unless it's in regular use, it can end up on crumbling tapes in an obsolete format that cannot be understood. There are various underfunded efforts to recover and transcribe old NASA data that suffer from this.

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