Could Canada be in the process of entering a new Great Darkness?

    A foul time for thinkers. Major scientific data distributed on the sly, legal suits designed to silence critical minds, troublesome bureaucrats fired, muzzling of scientific researchers in politically incorrect venues, publicized condemnation of intellectuals who don't toe the party line ... Since the beginning of the year, the signs of outrages to the free circulation of ideas have remarkably increased pretty much throughout the country. As elsewhere in the Western world, moreover. And of necessity, these clots forming in the arteries of knowledge give one question an ever-stronger resonance: are we in the process of collectively entering a new age of obscurantism?

    "There is a real risk," worries Pierre Noreau, president of the Francophone Association for Knowledge (ACFAS), who put a petition up on his Internet site this morning against the emerging culture of secrecy and darkness. Scientists, thinkers and simple passersby are invited to sign it. "It's a necessary gesture," he continues. "The last few months have underlined this obscurantist temptation that is stronger than ever and we must respond."

    The phenomenon seems, moreover, to have been stimulated by the summer's humidity and dark storm clouds. The evidence? In two months, the federal government has, in fact, orchestrated the release of two important scientific reports on the sly, although they were financed with public funds. The first, an exhaustive analysis of the health risks associated to climate change that could affect Canada, saw its 500 pages revealed by means of a laconic press release on July 31 at 4:30 PM, right in the middle of the summer holidays.

    Chance or coincidence, the release of this report, initially scheduled for the beginning of the year, was delayed to fall smack in the middle of the summer; the countrywide promotional campaign for the document was cancelled without explanation and Health Canada, the ministry that ordered the study, has still not decided to post the report on its Internet site for free access.

    The authors of the report in question are outraged over this treatment. In the beginning of August in the pages of "Le Devoir," one of them, Colin Soskolne, from the University of Alberta's School of Public Health, compared the summer release of such an important investigation to the tactics for dissimulating the facts that can still be obtained in the republics of the former USSR. As far as he's concerned, Canada today is comparable to Azerbaijan with respect to transparency, as, moreover, the treatment reserved for the second report - dealing with the social costs of transportation in the country - could confirm. The federal investigation, a five-year-long project that brought contributions from dozens of experts together to measure the collective expenses linked to automobile congestion and air pollution was discreetly distributed by Ottawa. Without any fanfare, at the end of August.

    This timidity about making the facts public is a sport in expansion not only on the other side of the Ottawa River. Québec's public administration also played it last spring with the quinquennial report of the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) [Quebec Bureau for the French Language] on the situation of French in Québec. Quantifying a certain decline in the language of Molière on the island of Montréal, the document was, in fact, unveiled after some leaks and a year's delay in an apparent rationale of "concealment," "paranoia" and "secrecy" that several partisans for the free circulation of ideas denounced at the time. And, of course, all these ingredients fueled the controversy and suspicions of obscurantism.

    The Temptation of Secrecy

    Cult of secrecy. Dissimulation of public facts. Or stuffing reports not really in harmony with governmental plans into the cupboard - the disappearance of documents connected to the Kyoto Protocol from the site of Environment Canada the day after the Conservatives' election - are all elements of a phenomenon that does not surprise Université Laval historian Martin Pâquet, who reminds us that "obscurity was at the heart of government practice from the Middle Ages to the 17th century. Now, more and more, we see governments have a tendency to regress into that obscurity under the pretext that the culture of transparency would not allow effective government practices," says this specialist in the history of scientific thinking in Québec.

    To blame: the ambient individualism which, he says, does not necessarily make modern states ungovernable, "but rather, complex to govern." Self-referentially constructing themselves, he continues, citizens are also ever more informed, often through the intermediation of non-traditional channels of information that are more difficult to control. "In this context, governments are stuck in a double bind: with regard to complex scientific issues that can make people feel helpless," the historian says, "transparency can then feed their fear and damage a government's political 'agenda.'"

    In this context, the temptation of secrecy may be great, but circumstantial, deems political scientist Louis Côté, of the école nationale d'administration publique [National School for Public Administration] (ENAP), who is far from judging the recent rise in obscurantism as threatening. "When you think about it, there's more transparency today than there has ever been," says the director of the Observatory for Public Administration. "In 1930, in Canada, people didn't talk about governance [that is, with steering shared by all a society's actors], but of rule under the seal of secrecy. There was zero transparency. Nonetheless, today the expectations of transparency are higher, which can, through the effect of contrast, give the impression that there is less than there was before."

    Darkness on the Move

    That impression is tenacious. It is also not only local, but "globalized," adds Pierre Noreau, mentioning the United States, France, Great Britain and even Germany as other fertile hotbeds for obscurantism. Hotbeds where the government apparatus cultivates darkness, but also the public sector, universities and ordinary citizens ... "Today, seeking to understand the world has become a risky activity," he says.

    He takes the proliferation, here as elsewhere, of the famous SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) as another piece of evidence. "It's a way to promote self-censorship among individuals who think and reflect on the facts," says Mr. Noreau.

    The authors of the book "Noir Canada. Pillage, corruption et criminalité en Afrique" [Black Canada: Looting, Corruption, and Criminality in Africa"] (écosociété) tasted that legal intimidation at the beginning of this year. One after the other, the companies Barrick Gold, in Québec, and Banro Corporation, in Ontario, dragged the book's authors into the courts for damaging their reputation. Several documents the authors tracked down and published accused these mining companies, which subsequently claimed millions of dollars in damages. In this context, "the possibility debating the contents of these documents is imperiled," William Sacher, Alain Deneault and Delphine Abadie - the trio behind the investigation - indicated in an opinion letter published by "Le Devoir" last August.

    Before those authors, the Association québécoise de lutte contre la pollution atmosphérique [Quebec Association Against Air Pollution] (AQLPA), sued by American Iron & Meta, and then the militant Ottawa citizens for the closure of a dump, were subjected to the medicine of SLAPP, which now acts as a veritable grain of sand in a knowledge system that is nonetheless the fruit of a long and hard evolution. "Today, people have the possibility of devoting their lives to seeking to understand how our world operates," the head of ACFAS presses on. "But for that to function, the rules of the game need to be respected, by assuring that the results of their work are shared."

    Political scientist Louis Côté believes that also, as he believes, moreover, that the present signs of a certain resurgence in obscurantism should not in any case be perceived as a regression, but rather as an impetus to a collective movement forward. "When people attack the free circulation of ideas, it's ultimately democracy that is endangered," he says. "Now, democracy is a process, not a stationary state, and, in order to continue to advance, it requires more transparency and open debate." A plus that is obtained with one tried and true recipe: light, lots of light, which is ultimately the only means to fight against the dark.

    Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.