Letter from a petro-state

Over a year ago, a colleague at the University of Waterloo, Thomas Homer-Dixon, penned a compelling opinion piece for the New York Times in which he addressed, from a Canadian perspective, the debate surrounding the future of the planned Keystone XL Pipeline. If built, this pipeline would transport unprocessed, environmentally toxic Alberta tar sands bitumen to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico, Illinois and Oklahoma. Given the fact that Keystone has recently just failed, again, to pass the House, it is worth returning to the question raised by Homer-Dixon: is Canada becoming a ‘petro-state’? For Homer-Dixon, a state could be defined as a petro-state if virtually all of its main features could be ever more narrowly geared to the development of this single sector: non-renewal energy.  This narrowing has deleterious implications for innovation, economy and democracy. Let us address each of these in turn.

If we understand basic research in science to be directly related to innovation insofar as many forms of technology and their application stem not from research in applied science per se but from basic research, then in Canada we have seen specifically a drastic diminution in a  substantive commitment to technical innovation. Two years ago, Stephen Harper’s Conservative government announced that it would only fund science with determinant applicability, which is to say, those forms of sciences that could be directly marketable. Moreover, it has actively muzzled government scientists and librarians, severely limiting what they can and cannot say in public. For Karl Popper, the “open society” was a society in which there existed a robust culture of “conjecture and refutation” which constituted the very condition for the possibility of scientific innovation. That is, scientific truth-claims are those claims that can stand the open test of evidence-based falsifiability by other scientists and the public at large.

In my own province of British Columbia, the government has announced a dramatic shift of priority away from liberal arts and science at the level of secondary education, despite evidence that employers prefer prospective employees with a general education, to training geared specifically to the oil and gas industries which it is actively promoting as the economic future of the province. It has just secured the green light within the legislature for the development of a number of new Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) projects. The closure of scientific discourse, as well as roll-backs to liberal arts education, of course, does not bode well for social innovation. Prospects are slim for envisioning new modes of living together – ever more important with increasingly levels of migration and societal diversity – insofar as robust and unrestricted discussion and debate is its necessary if not sufficient condition.