Nine years of censorship
▻http://www.nature.com/news/nine-years-of-censorship-1.19842
The crackdown on government scientists in #Canada began in 2006, after Stephen Harper of the Conservative Party was elected prime minister. [...] For decades before the Harper administration, reporters had been free to call up government researchers directly for interviews. But suddenly, all requests for interviews had to be sent to government communications offices, which then had to get approval from multiple tiers of bureaucrats higher up. “It was an incredible rigmarole to try and get the most innocuous bit of information to media or the public,” says Diane Lake, who was a communications officer with the DFO at the time.
[...] Although the approval ‘rules’ were unwritten, Lake says it became clear over time what stories were likely to be permitted. Under Harper, government-science stories, “could only reflect economics, and what you could sell, not what you could save or conserve”, she says.