CANMET employees betrayed

The Canadian government’s top materials research laboratories are being moved from Canada’s pretty, vibrant capital city to the small, depressed industrial city of Hamilton, on the western end of Lake Ontario.

In early July, the federal government announced that the majority of Natural Resources Canada’s CANMET Materials Technology Laboratory (CANMET-MTL) will be uprooted from its longtime home on Booth Street, near Ottawa’s picturesque Dows Lake, and transplanted to an as-yet-unbuilt laboratory in Hamilton at McMaster University’s new “Innovation Park.” Some 100 scientists, engineers and support workers will have their lives turned upside down.

(For our U.S. readers, imagine your reaction upon being told that your high-level research job at a top-notch laboratory in Boston is being relocated to a field in Toledo, Ohio.)

In addition to the usual bureaucratic babble about creating “synergies” and “supporting excellence and innovation,” the government’s press release announcing the momentous change is full of nose-stretchers such as, “the move will facilitate collaboration with. . . international partners in China, India and the United States.”

It’s news to us that Ottawa has closed its airport and been cut off from all telephone and Internet connections, unlike the mighty, cosmopolitan Hamilton, crossroads of the world.

Needless to say, the move to Hamilton will substantially weaken CANMET for the foreseeable future as many scientists and engineers will depart rather than relocate. Those willing to suck it up and move will have their work disrupted for years.

The relocation is a particular slap in the face to CANMET-MTL’s francophone employees who can now choose, like so many in the Ottawa region, to live with their families in a French culture in Quebec and still commute south to work in Ontario — a unique, pleasant lifestyle unattainable in southern Ontario’s rust belt.

The federal government and its partners will be throwing around upwards of $60 million to build and outfit a new facility in Hamilton, even though one already exists in Ottawa. McMaster will also now have a guiding hand in setting CANMET-MTL’s agenda, including when and how it will move.

If this move doesn’t benefit CANMET and wastes taxpayers’ money, then why is it being done? Sadly, the state of Canadian government today means that to figure out why the civil service is doing something that appears to be nonsensical, you first have to ask yourself, how does the Liberal Party of Canada benefit?

In this case, one doesn’t have to look too far: the relocation of CANMET’s labs is political booty for Tony Valeri, leader of the government in the House of Commons and Member of Parliament for Hamilton East-Stoney Creek. Valeri was a staunch supporter of Prime Minister Paul Martin for years as he plotted to take over the Liberal party from then-Prime Minister Jean Chrtien and his coterie. In particular, Valeri scored a critical victory over the populist Sheila Copps, the former high-level Liberal cabinet minister and Chrtienite. She dared run against Martin for the Liberal leadership in late 2003, and was later brought down by Valeri in a vicious riding nomination meeting leading up to last year’s federal election.

(Copps still clings to the margins of public life: the former Deputy Prime Minister has stooped to appearing on a low-grade Canadian soap opera and speaking at a Green Party function.)

Surprise, surprise: McMaster is also a big supporter of the Liberals. In June 2005, even after shocking, sworn testimony about deep and widespread corruption in the federal Liberal Party, McMaster went ahead and conferred an honorary degree on Jean Chrtien.

McMaster University’s president and vice-chancellor, Peter George, defended the decision in a nausea-inducing op-ed piece in the Hamilton Spectator. While acknowledging that the “decision to honour Mr. Chrtien could be construed at this moment as misguided,” George heaped praise on a man who, “more than any other politician, got it” and “deserves our honour and gratitude.”

George, as a typical member of Canada’s liberal elite, buys whole-heartedly into the myopic attitude of so many recipients of the Liberal’s sugar-daddy federalism: as long as I get my money, I don’t care where it comes from.

With the relocation of CANMET’s labs, Canadian taxpayers and a great Canadian institution are once again being made to suffer to satisfy the political demands of federal cabinet ministers. One can’t help but wonder if firms friendly to the Liberal Party of Canada will get the resulting construction and relocation contracts.