[FORUM] Do your countries and/or governments dislike experts, too?

[rfmcdonald]

Blogger James Bow has some choice words about the Conservative government's populist distaste for experts and what they have to say about the way things are and should be run, even if ignoring them leads to significant net losses for Canadians.

Back in September, Chet Scoville of the Vanity Press reported on a report by Michael Jackson, a law professor at the University of British Columbia. The report criticized the Conservative government’s proposal for revamping Canada’s prison policy. Basicallly, the massive prisons that the Conservatives hope to build are a waste of money, don’t solve the problem of crime, and possibly thwart our ability to rehabilitate these people, and the Conservatives appear to be ploughing ahead with this policy on ideological rather than rational grounds.

Their scathing analysis contends that the government road map starts with what they call an ideological “myth” — that prisoners’ human rights are at odds with public safety.

“What that’s doing is polarizing a discussion about corrections in a really unfortunate way,” Mr. Stewart said.

“It creates the notion that the decent treatment of prisoners is somehow putting the public at risk, when in fact it’s the complete reverse. …

“We don’t believe that abuse improves people.”

For the Conservatives’ part, they don’t outright deny Mr. Jackson’s criticisms. Indeed, they revel in them:

Ian Brodie, Harper’s former chief of staff, told a McGill University symposium last March that criticism of the tough-on-crime policy by sociologists, lawyers and criminologists actually bolsters the Conservative case — because they are held in lower regard than politicians.

“Politically it helped us tremendously to be attacked by this coalition,” Mr. Brodie said. “So we never really had to engage in the question of what the evidence actually shows about various approaches to crime.”

For anybody who believes that politics should be an honest debate; for anybody who holds that democracy is a marketplace of ideas where policies rise and fall on their merits, this attitude should ring alarm bells. Here you have individuals who have worked hard, for years, in their chosen field of study, who have carefully gathered the facts, and have crafted credible arguments based on them, being dismissed because they have done just that. These individuals are arguably closer to the truth than most people — particularly these Conservative politicians — would care to admit, but rather than debate with them, or even agree to disagree, the experts are dismissed because their arguments do not feel right.

This, he goes on to note, has very serious effects indeed.

By disparaging the work of experts to the extent where some people believe that we should do the opposite of what the experts say, you do severe damage to the very people you’re supposed to serve. If you deliberately turn aside good advice, you allow yourself to govern with bad advice, and you govern to the detriment of the country.

[. . .]

Consider that Linda Keen and her colleagues on the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission believed that it was important that the nuclear facility at Chalk River be shut down so that necessary safety improvements could be made, and they were attacked as “Liberal appointees” by Stephen Harper and Gary Lunn. Now Chalk River has been shut down in a rather more unplanned way, and the shortage of medical isotopes is getting worse. The director of FEMA during the Clinton years had actual disaster management experience and reasonably coped with hurricane strikes, tornadic destruction, et cetera. George W. Bush’s appointee, Michael Brown, had previously managed the International Arabian Horse Association (and had departed under a cloud), and you can see how well the federal government in the U.S. managed the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Partly POV? Sure. I also agree with Bow's analysis.

So, that's Canada. Are there any similar trends in your societies and polities?

Discuss.