PhDs, clean out your desks.

These are tough times. We all need to economize, especially governments. So I have a suggestion for finance ministers coping with swelling deficits.

Fire all the scientists.

All of them. Just go through the ranks of the civil service, find everyone with a PhD, and tell them to clean out their desks. Unless their PhD is in philosophy or something. Those people can keep their jobs in the mailroom.

Who needs them, right? Not John Gerretsen. This week, Ontario's environment minister announced his government's ban on the sale and use of pesticides will come into force on April 22. That's Earth Day. Apparently the minister is going to save Gaia.

What makes this announcement particularly promising is that Gerretsen confirmed that one of the pesticides that will be banned is 2,4-D. One of the world's most common herbicides, 2,4-D has been used since the Second War and there's a small mountain of research on it.

And what does that small mountain say about 2,4-D? Well, like all science, the evidence is often contradictory. And it's extremely complex. Figuring out what it all means on balance is a very tough job that can only be done by highly trained people in broad consultation with other highly trained people.

If ever there were a good reason for governments to employ scientists, assessing the safety of 2,4-D would be it.

And as it turns out, the federal government does employ scientists to assess the safety of pesticides. They work for Health Canada's Pest Management Regulatory Agency.
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It further turns out that those scientists conducted a comprehensive review of the research on 2,4-D. And by "comprehensive," I mean very, very expensive.

Last spring, after the Ontario government announced its intention to ban pesticides, but before it settled which pesticides would be banned, PMRA released the conclusion of its very, very expensive review: "There is reasonable certainty that no harm to human health, future generations, or the environment will result from use or exposure to this product."

That seems pretty clear. But Gerretsen and his government weren't interested. They went ahead and banned 2,4-D anyway.

This clearly demonstrates that governments don't need scientists. They're a waste of money, what with their big salaries and their labs and computers. Fire the lot of them.

Think of the money we would have saved if, instead of funding PMRA to review the science on 2,4-D, the federal government had told all those Poindexters to get a real job. Drive a cab or something. Whatever. Just take your PhD and your Bunsen burners and hit the bricks.

Of course this doesn't mean governments should abandon science. Oh no. Science is a good thing. Everybody loves science. Even the McGuinty government.

In fact, when he introduced the pesticide ban, Gerretsen cited reviews of the scientific literature produced by environmental activists and groups like the Ontario College of Family Physicians.
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Admittedly, the soon-to-be-unemployed scientists at the PMRA looked at the same material and found it to be deeply flawed. In fact, when I spoke to Leonard Ritter, a professor at the University of Guelph and a leading expert on pesticides, he suggested some of the people doing that work weren't qualified. "I don't offer patients advice on when they should have their gall bladder taken out. And I sometimes think it would be better if physicians, largely family physicians, who really have no training in this area at all, it would be better to leave the interpretation of the data to people who are competent to do it."

Still, let's not get all worked up about "competence" and "agendas." What matters is that by firing all the government scientists and letting third parties tell politicians what the science says, taxpayers will save a bundle.

Now, I know that conservatives may object. But that's only because, in this case, the interested third-parties informing government policy happen to be folks conservatives don't like. But different governments can turn to different third-parties. So sometimes it will be corporations deciding what the science says.

That will balance things out -- and keep costs down. Everybody wins.

Everybody except government scientists, of course. But who needs them? Right?

You can contact Dan Gardner at the Ottawa Citizen.
E-mail: dgardner@thecitizen.canwest.com

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