Tag Archives: Lisa Johnson

Science and the new Canadian cabinet

Justin Trudeau, Canada’s new Prime Minister was sworn in this morning (Nov. 4, 2015). He announced his new cabinet which holds 30 or 31 ministers (reports conflict), 15 of whom are women.

As for my predictions about how science would be treated in the new cabinet, I got it part of it right. Navdeep Singh Bains was named Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development. I believe it’s the old Industry Canada ministry and it seemed the science portfolio was rolled into that ‘new’ ministry name as I suggested in my Nov. 2, 2015 posting. (I thought it would be Industry and Science.) However, there is also a Minister of Science, Kirsty Duncan. This represents a promotion of sorts for the science portfolio since it was previously considered a junior ministry as signified by the title ‘Minister of State (Science and Technology)’.

It appears science is on the Liberal agenda although how they’re going to resolve two ministers and ministries having science responsibilities should be interesting. At the top level, I imagine it’s going to be split into applied science or commercial science (Innovation) as opposed to basic science or fundamental science (Science). The problem in these situations is that there’s a usually a grey area.

Moving on, if there’s anything that’s needs to be done quickly within the science portfolios, it’s the reinstatement of the mandatory long form census. Otherwise, there’s no hope of including it as part of the 2016 census. This should induce a sigh of relief across the country from the business community and provincial and municipal administrators who have had some planning and analysis problems due to the lack of reliable data from the 2011 census and its mandated, by then Prime Minister Stephen Harper, voluntary long form census.

***ETA Nov. 6, 2015: A day after the cabinet announcement, there was an announcement reinstating the mandatory long form census about which David Bruggeman provides an update in a Nov. 5, 2015 posting on his Pasco Phronesis blog (Note: Links have been removed),

He [Justin Trudeau] also announced his cabinet, and his government announced that it would restore the mandatory long-form census. I’ll focus on the cabinet, but the census decision is a big deal, especially with the next one scheduled for 2016. The official list of the top tier Cabinet appointments is online.

The census decision was announced by the new Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, MP Navdeep Bains. Minister Bains was returned to Parliament in this year’s election, having served previously in Parliament from 2004-2011. His training is in finance and his non-Parliamentary experience has been in financial analysis. …

If you have the time, do read David’s post he includes more detailed descriptions of the new ‘science’ cabinet appointees. And, back to the original text of this posting where I highlight two of the ‘science’ appointments.***

As for the two new ‘science’ ministers, Kirsty Duncan and Navdeep Singh Bains there’s this from the Nov. 4, 2015 cabinet list on the Globe & Main website,

Navdeep Singh Bains
[Member of Parliament {MP} for] Mississauga-Malton, Ontario

Innovation, science and economic development

Former accountant at the Ford Motor Company of Canada. Former professor at Ryerson University’s management school. Entered federal politics in Mississauga in 2004.

Kirsty Duncan
[MP] Etobicoke North, Ontario

Science

Medical geographer and former professor at the University of Windsor and University of Toronto. Has been a Liberal MP since 2008.

For those who don’t know, Etobicoke (pronounced e [as in etymology] toh bi coh), is considered a part of the city of Toronto.

There is more information about this new government in the form of a PDF listing the new Cabinet committees and their membership. I’m not sure about the protocol but it would have been nice to see Elizabeth May, MP and leader of the Green Party, listed as a member of the Cabinet Committee on Environment, Climate Change and Energy (there were three petitions asking she be named Environment Minister according to an Oct. 20, 2015 news item by Lisa Johnson for CBC [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation] news online). Perhaps she’ll be on a Parliamentary committee concerned with these issues.

More predictions

Buoyed by my almost successful prognostication, I’m going to add another couple to the mix.

I think there will be the appointment of a Chief Science Advisor (likely answering to the Prime Minister or Prime Minister’s Office) and while some might think Ted Hsu would be a good choice, I suspect (sadly) he would be considered too partisan a choice. A physicist by training, he was a Liberal Member of Parliament and the party’s science and technology critic in the recently dissolved 41st Parliament of Canada from June 2, 2011 to August 15, 2015. However, should Prime Minister Justin Trudeau choose to appoint a Parliamentary Science Officer after appointing a Chief Science Advisor to the government, Hsu might be considered a very good choice given his experience as both scientist and parliamentarian. (As I understand it, a Parliamentary Science Officer, as modeled by the UK system, is someone who gives science advice to Members of Parliament who may request such advice when dealing with bills that contain science policy or require a better understanding of science, e.g. an energy bill, when debating and voting on the measure.)

Justin Trudeau and his British Columbia connection

Amusingly, the University of British Columbia (UBC) is touting the fact that Trudeau graduated from there with an undergraduate degree in Education. From a Nov. 4, 2015 UBC news release (received in my email),

The University of British Columbia congratulates Justin Trudeau, who earned a bachelor of education from UBC in 1998, on becoming Prime Minister of Canada today.

“It is not every day that a UBC alumnus achieves Canada’s highest office,” said Interim President Martha Piper. “As UBC celebrates its Centennial year, Mr. Trudeau’s accomplishment will serve as a prominent marker in the history of our university and count among the highest achievements of our more than 300,000 alumni.”

Trudeau is the first UBC graduate to be elected prime minister and joins fellow alumni prime ministers Kim Campbell (BA’69, LLB’83) and John Turner (BA’49) who were appointed upon securing their party leadership.

UBC would also like to congratulate alumna Jody Wilson-Raybould (LLB’99), who was appointed Minster of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, and all the other cabinet ministers appointed today.

“UBC looks forward to working with Prime Minister Trudeau and his cabinet in the coming months and continuing the strong dialogue UBC has enjoyed with our partners in Ottawa,” said Piper.

This is only amusing if you know that UBC is trying desperately to distance itself from a recent scandal where Arvind Gupta, president, stepped down (July 2015) from his position at the university only one year into his term for reasons no one will disclose. While the timing (the news release was distributed late on a Friday afternoon) and secrecy seemed suspicious, the scandal aspect developed when the chair of the UBC Board of Governors, John Montalbano called a faculty member to complain about a blog posting where she speculated about some of the pressures that may have been brought to bear on Gupta. Her subsequent posting about Montalbano’s phone call and senior faculty response excited media interest leading eventually into an investigation into Montalbano’s behaviour and charges that he was interfering with academic freedom. Recently exonerated (Oct. 15, 2015), Montalbano resigned from the board, while UBC admitted it had failed to support and protect academic freedom. Interesting, non?

Comments on ScienceOnline Vancouver’s first event

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Bravo to the organizers, Catherine Anderson, Sarah Chow, and Peter Newberry of Vancouver’s (Canada) first ScienceOnline event last night (Thursday, April 19, 2012 first mentioned my April 4, 2012 posting). They attracted, by my count, a crowd of about 75-80 people. A free event held at Science World, there were three speakers Rosie Redfield, Lisa Johnson, and Anthony Floyd. Here’s a bit more about them from the event description page,

Rosie Redfield – Named Nature’s most influential person of 2011, this associate professor of microbiology at UBC [University of British Columbia] hit science fame through her blog RRResearch disputing NASA’s claim life exists in arsenic.

Lisa Johnson – Multiplatform journalist with a keen interest in environment and science stories. She enjoys digging, storytelling, and finding context in breaking news.

Anthony Floyd – aerospace research engineer with a PhD in Civil Engineering from UBC. Although strictly a digital immigrant, Anthony grew up with technology as technology grew up. He is quite active in social media. Anthony’s a proud dad to two boys, year-round bike commuter, opinionated political observer, and Maritimer-in-exile.

The event was titled, Where do you get your science? It was the third event I attended yesterday so maybe I was a little less tolerant than I can be. I was expecting a lively discussion about finding science what I got was Redfield and Johnson talking about the arsenic life story and their roles in that story locally and, in Redfield’s case, internationally. The only one who really talked about finding science online was Floyd.

I’m not sure if the organizers were hoping that the ‘arsenic life’ stories would somehow tie into the topic or if the two speakers just went off on their own tangents.

Redfield gave an ‘ignite’ talk, which is five minutes long with 20 slides in a timed slideshow where the speaker has to keep time with the slides. I’m sorry to say she overmodulated (used the storytime voice usually aimed at an audience of five-year olds) for much of the talk. Johnson made the point several times that it wasn’t her fault that the story was wrong. She did admit at one point that she could have dug more deeply and, in fact, someone suggested that she talk to Rosie Redfield for advice about this story at very early stage, something she failed to do. Most valuable to me was the reminder of the constraints that journalists are under.

Note: I, too, got caught up with my Dec. 6, 2010 posting and I subsequently apologized, Dec. 8, 2010 posting.

Floyd, as I noted earlier, did address the question, Where do you get your science?, although he did ask his audience to make a bit of a leap when he used a story about searching for information about bicycle helmets and bylaws to illustrate one of his points.

I wasn’t able to stay for the more informal discussion after the speakers finished but the organizers did manage a good icebreaker exercise at the beginning. The audience seemed * to be mostly in their 20s and 30s.

It was a very technology-heavy event in that there was livestreaming, multiple computers and screens, references to tweeting and Storify, etc.

Aside: All three of the events I attended yesterday had technology issues of one kind or another. I’m not especially happy when almost all of the attention is on the technology while the live audience is left waiting or is interrupted during question period to accommodate a tweet or has to endure feedback.

I did mention Storify, the ScienceOnline Vancouver Storify ‘story’ is here and you can check #sovan on Twitter for other responses to last night’s event.

All in all, it was a very promising start, despite my nitpicks.

*Removed a redundant work ‘mostly’ on January 14, 2020.

The Naked Truth on Friday, May 13, 2011

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I’m looking forward to being on the Canadian science blogging panel that’s taking place at the Northern Voice Conference, May 13 – 14, 2011 at the University of British Columbia’s Life Sciences Centre. The presentation panel I’m on is slated for Friday, May 13, 2011, from 1:45 pm to 2:30 pm and it’s called: The Naked Truth: Canadian Science Blogging Scene.

The other panelists include:

Beth Snow of The Black Hole. In one of her most recent postings, she tackles a topic most of us don’t think about when we’re talking about careers in science, Academic Couples. Excerpted from the post,

I can think of a few people right now who are in some stage of dealing with this issue [both partners are academics]. In addition to the friend I mentioned above, I know a dual-academic couple who both work at the same university, I know a couple where both partners are former-academics (they did their PhDs at the UBC, found their first postdocs together in another city, came back to UBC for second postdocs each and then both left academics for non-academic jobs) and I know a couple where the academic partner is seriously considering leaving academics because of a variety of reasons, with family being one of the big ones.

Eric Michael Johnson of The Primate Diaries in Exile recently blogged this intriguing piece, The Allure of Gay Cavemen, which was cross posted on the Wired magazine website,

In 1993 the reputable German weekly Der Spiegel reported a rumor that Otzi, the 5,300-year-old frozen mummy discovered in the Otztal Alps two years earlier, contained evidence of the world’s earliest known homosexual act. “In Otzi’s Hintern,” wrote the editors, referring to the Iceman’s hinterland, “Spermien gefunden worden.” (If you require a translation, chances are you didn’t want to know anyway.) The rumor quickly spread on computer bulletin boards as the recently unveiled World Wide Web inaugurated a new age in the free flow of misinformation. The origin of the rumor, as Cecil Adams discovered, turns out to have been an April Fool’s prank published in the Austrian gay magazine Lambda Nachrichten. The joke about our ancient uncle being penetrated deep in the Alps was then picked up by other periodicals, but with a straight face.

Twenty years later it appears that little has changed.

Rosie Redfileld of RRResearch talks about mutant cells amongst other things in My experiments: might I have a plan?

Classes have been over for a month and I have yet to do an experiment! For shame. But after going over everyone else’s projects I think I have a clear idea of what I should be doing.

1. Measure starvation-induced competence for each of the competence-gene knockouts: This will be replicating measurements done by an undergraduate over the past 6 months. I’ll just do each strain once, provided my results agree with hers. I’ll also freeze some of the competent cells.

2. Assay phage recombination in the competent and non-competent mutant cells: Old experiments using temperature-sensitive mutants of the H. influenzae temperate phage HP1 showed that recombination between the ts loci is more frequent in competent cells and completely dependent on the host RecA pathway (undetectable in a rec1 mutant). Phage recombination is much more efficient in competent cells than in log-phase cells; this is true both when competence is induced by starvation of wildtype cells (in MIV medium) and when it is induced by the presence of the sxy1 hypercompetence mutation (in rich medium).

The panel moderator, Lisa Johnson is a CBC journalist specializing in science and environment stories. She also has her own blog where her Oct. 14, 2009 posting, Squid surveillance, in several ways proves sadly timeless,

I find squid pretty inherently interesting. They’re believed to be smart, and I’d call them beautiful, but they’re also so alien to our terrestrial, vertebrate selves.

Even more interesting, or perhaps alarming, is what’s happening with the Humboldt squid in B.C. waters.

First, why are they here? They’re native to northern Mexico, but in the past ten years have spread northward, first to California, and now all the way to southeast Alaska. That is a big change in such a short time.

Secondly, they’re washing up dead on beaches in large numbers.

Then, there’s me. Maryse de la Giroday, FrogHeart. If you keep scrolling down this page, you’ll probably find something of interest.

We will all be there on Friday and we look forward to discussing science and science blogging in Canada. See ya there.

FrogHeart on science blogging panel at Northern Voice 2011 Conference