Michael Riordon

the view from where I live

Category Archives: Government policy


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Gay ‘conversion’ on trial in China

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of our own choosing.   George Orwell, 1949, in 1984.

Gay 'conversion therapy', China protestProtest: “Homosexuals don’t need treatment,” Haidian court, Beijing, July 31, 2014.              Photo: Li Hao/Global Times.

A young man in China, Xiao Zhen, has taken a courageous public stand against the forced ‘conversion’ of gay people in his country.  (Xiao Zhen is a pseudonym, to protect himself and his family from harassment.)

“I was electro-shocked at a gay ‘cure’ center. Doctors hypnotized me and said they would ‘shock the gay’ out of me.

In families like mine, being gay is still seen as something that can be cured, and scam clinics prey on that fear. Now, I want my friends, my family and everyone in China to understand that being gay is normal.”

Though I’ve never met Xiao Zhen, I think of him as a younger brother. In 1968 I underwent the same electro-shock ‘treatment’ in Canada, for the same reason. Then it was called ‘aversion therapy,’ now it’s rebranded more positively as ‘conversion therapy.’ Either way, it’s torture. This should not happen to anyone, anywhere.

Remarkably, not only has Xiao Zhen taken the clinic to court, in a landmark case for China, now he has also taken an even bolder step: a petition to the World Health Organization.

“If we can get the World Health Organization (WHO) to join in and speak out against gay ‘cures’, it could help convince officials to finally ban these dangerous gay ‘cures.’

Will you sign my petition asking WHO Director Dr. Margaret Chan to speak up now and condemn gay ‘cures’ in China?”

More than 87,000 people have already signed the petition.  Please add your voice here, and pass this message on to others.

Psychiatry and psychology are among the many tools marshalled by the powerful to repress nonconformity and dissent.  More on this, and the resistance, in Bold Scientists: dispatches from the battle for honest science, available September 4 from Between the Lines.


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“They cannot stop me from talking.”

Scientists Biased, Talk Too Much: Confidential government memo.

Details here, in Blacklock’s Reporter: minding Ottawa’s business, August 11, 2014.

Tar sands 2Tar sands, Alberta, Canada.  Photo: The Nation.

The primary target of the confidential memo, John Smol, is a professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, a widely acclaimed paleolimnologist (fathoming the life stories of lakes), and Canada Research Chair in Environmental Change.

Why does the Harper government want to silence John Smol and his co-researchers?  Because they know too much.  The current regime in Ottawa is an aggressive booster of the enormously destructive tar sands colossus, and is determined to keep Canadians strictly on message: tar sands = good for Canada, with minimal harm.  Period.  Trouble is, their message keeps getting shredded by the findings of honest science.

Why won’t John Smol shut up?  He knows too much:

“The huge problem is that many environmental problems are long scale.  They can take years, decades to show up – or longer, sometimes I work in centuries, even millennia.  But politicians think in terms of four years, at best.  Look at the tar sands – go ahead, pump it out as fast as you can, we’ll be out of here in four years, what do we care?  Industry is even worse, they think in quarters, 90-day intervals.  Costs for the future are horrendous, but they’re not in this fiscal cycle.  When things go extinct, they’re extinct forever.  You destroy a river system, it’s gone. Destroy a fish population, it’s gone.  How do you gauge what that’s worth?”

Delve into John Smol’s research, paleolimnology, and why he speaks out, in Bold Scientists: dispatches from the battle for honest science.  Available September 4, 2014, in print and e-book from Between the Lines.


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Weather report: no climate change.

extreme weatherPhoto: National Geographic

This week in Canada, the Harper regime decreed:

Henceforth, there will be no talk of climate change from any meteorologist employed by the Canadian Meteorological Service (a division of Environment Canada).

Investigative reporter Mike De Souza revealed the new ban here.

A government official who is permitted to talk to the media – but not to say anything of substance – told De Souza that meteorologists are qualified to talk about extreme weather, but not climate.

The ban – officially known as a “communications protocol” – extends the Harper regime’s aggressive silencing of scientists whose research might provoke questions about the regime’s pro-corporate, anti-environment agenda.  True to the most insidious forms of censorship, the boundaries of what’s forbidden are not specified.

Apparently this ongoing reign of terror works.  De Souza reports that, since the government’s 2007 decree that all federal scientists must obtain management approval before giving any interviews on their research, an internal Environment Canada analysis noted an 80 per cent drop in media coverage of climate change issues.

Fortunately, scientists are resisting.  Follow their stories in Bold Scientists: dispatches from the battle for honest science, autumn 2014 from Between the Lines.


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Good news: The ELA is saved!

In April 2012, the government of Canada announced that it would close the world-renowned Experimental Lakes Area (ELA) in northwest Ontario.  Since 1968 the world-renowned research station has hosted a unique whole-ecosystem approach to studying how lake ecosystems and fish respond to human and natural disturbances.  The resulting data, unattainable anywhere else, is essential for objective, evidence-based decision-making.

Save ELAWithin hours of the closure announcement, marine biology PhD candidate Diane Orihel launched an international campaign to save the ELA.

Two years later, victory!  Today the grassroots Canadian organization Evidence for Democracy announced that a final agreement has just been reached to transfer operation of the ELA to the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), based in Manitoba.  It will be backed by the governments of Ontario and Manitoba, which appear to be less hostile to evidence-based decisions and policies.

For more on the vital connections between science, evidence and democracy, Evidence for Democracy offers two public events:

5 pm, Thursday April 3, Dr. Munir Sheikh, former Chief Statistician of Canada, on why public policy needs to be informed by evidence.  The event will be live streamed. Details here.

Governing in the Dark, a recent public talk by Canadian biologist Scott Findlay can be seen or read online, here.

In dark times, signs of hope.

Follow the Save ELA story in Bold Scientists: dispatches from the battle for honest science, coming from Between the Lines, autumn 2014.


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Good news from Chile!

From the newly elected government of Chile, an inspiring initiative on the genetic manipulation front:

Chile Derails ‘Monsanto Law’ That Would Privatize Seeds.

Chile protests GMOsPhoto: International Business Times

The bold move followed years of public protest against GMOs throughout Chile.

Alicia Muñoz, of the National Association of Rural and Indigenous Women (Anamuri) explains: “All of the resistance that rural organizations, principally indigenous communities, led during these past years was a success.  We were able to convey to the parliament how harmful the law would be for the indigenous communities and farmers who feed us all.  Big agriculture, or agro-business, is just that, a business.  It doesn’t feed our country.”

Meanwhile in Canada, the US and the EU, governments beholden to the agri-corps rush to do their profit-driven bidding.

The new government in Chile sets an example of what responsible governments can do when they attend to the needs of their people, rather than serve the grey ghosts that stalk the corridors of power.

Follow the international GMO battle in Bold Scientists: dispatches from the battle for honest science, coming from Between the Lines, autumn 2014.