Posted: January 17th, 2010 - 9:19am by Doug Powell

My friend Ron Doering, a lawyer with Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP, and a former president of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (and the only CFIA president anyone can remember) writes in this morning’s National Post that science is always politicized.

Couldn’t agree more, and Doering has the real world experience to know. The way to deal with such realities is to fully disclose sources of bias and assumptions so that others can have a look and see if they come to the same conclusion.

“Science, policy and politics are inextricably intertwined. What is surprising is how much our public discourse is still dominated by the quaint utopian view that science and policy can be strictly separated.

Scholars of science in policy have long ago shown that you can’t take policy out of science. Studies of scientific advising leave in tatters the notion that it is possible, in practice, to restrict the advisory practice to technical issues or that the subjective values of scientists are irrelevant to decision making. This is especially true in public policy issues such as climate change where much of the science is complex and uncertain.

How safe are genetically engineered foods? What is the best way to store long-term high-level nuclear waste? How safe is PBA in water bottles? Should phthalates be banned from plastic toys? These are some of the public policy questions with which I have been closely involved as a practitioner of the regulatory craft over the past 35 years. In all these cases science is relevant but not determinative. And yet in all these cases the parties argued that the basic question was one of science: If only we could get the science right, the public policy answer would follow. If only the world were that simple.

In practice, assumptions that have potential policy implications enter into risk assessment at virtually every stage of the process. The idea of a risk assessment that is free, or nearly free, of policy considerations is beyond the realm of possibility.

That scientists should dress up their science advice as pure neutral science is understandable. For those with scientific expertise, it makes perfect sense to wage political battles through science because it necessarily confers to scientists a privileged position in political debate. …

When I was president of Canada’s largest science-based regulator, I was regularly confronted by scientists who resented that senior officials and ministers would dare to weigh their policy advice with social, economic, ethical and political policy considerations. Often they were seemingly unaware how much their science advice was imbued with unstated policy considerations, even if steps had been taken to mitigate the influence of these factors. This fall I taught a law and policy course to a group of graduate students in science at a leading Canadian university. These students seemed genuinely unaware, uncomfortable even, with the idea that science-based health risk assessments were replete with policy considerations.”