To: press
From: "K.N.I. Bell" <K.Bell@ru.ac.za>
Subject: INFO. RELEASE May 01 2000: Open letter to PM re COSEWIC
Cc:
Bcc:
X-Attachments:
original date: May 01, 2000.

--- INFORMATION RELEASE ---

From: Dr. K.N.I. Bell <k.bell@ru.ac.za> or phone international +27 046 636 1002 (daytime South Africa)

Where story: Ottawa, Canada

Keywords: COSEWIC; Cod; fishery collapse; environment; regulation; government; conduct; oversight;

An open letter and information appendix was sent by Dr K.N.I. Bell to the Prime Minister of Canada the Right Hon. J. Chrétien, Friday April 28, 2000. Receipt has been confirmed. The letter dealt with concerns about how COSEWIC (Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada) operates, and particularly in how it handled the Atlantic cod designation.
------------------

THIS RELEASE CONSISTS OF
[1] Backgrounder -- for more detail see attached file.
[2] The letter portion also appears at the foot of this message so it can be read without opening the file.
A file is either attached or available on request from <k.bell@ru.ac.za>: "BELLopmj" MS Word 5.1. Contains the letter ([2] at foot of this message) and long appendix which can be consulted for details if needed.
------------------
[1]
BACKGROUNDER (written in third person by KNIB -- public domain) 564 words.

In an open letter to the Prime Minster Friday April 28, the author of a solicited Report on the Status of Cod recommends that key reforms be made in COSEWIC, and also that it be brought within the terms of reference of the Office of the Auditor General (OAG) and the Commissioner of Environment and Sustainable Development (CESD).

COSEWIC (Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada) is a government-funded committee which assigns status designations to species and populations of Canadian wildlife.

COSEWIC had asked Bell in 1994 to prepare a Report on the Status of Atlantic Cod in Canada.

The Atlantic Cod fishery collapsed in the early 1990’s, and in most areas a moratorium was placed on fishing.

Approximately 40,000 people directly employed in the fishery were put out of work. It still has not recovered. The cost to taxpayers was measured in billions.

COSEWIC's own scientific reviewers praised the Report highly.

Press interest during 1997 and 1998 focused on political delays and the alteration of sections of the Report without the author’s permission.

COSEWIC accepted the Report in 1998 and designated Cod "Vulnerable". However, this designation disregarded key recommendations in the Report, and also disregarded a strong recommendation from DFO in 1996 that the designations should be on the basis of “species populations which are geographically distinct”.

COSEWIC disregarded these recommendations and considered cod as a single unit.

COSEWIC is required by its own rules to release accepted Reports to the public, but the Cod Report has remained unreleased for two years. COSEWIC, in a letter from its Chair Dr. David Green in 1999, wrote the author that it intended to alter the Report such that it would "reflect" the designation made. COSEWIC offered the author the opportunity to have his name removed from the altered Report "so that you need not be thought responsible for its conclusions". The author refused permission.

Bell argues that retroactively fitting the Report to the designation is improper chiefly because it hides a discrepancy between recommendation and the designation. Certainly, COSEWIC decides on designation and is not obliged to follow a Report’s recommendations. But where COSEWIC deviates from a Report’s recommendations, or excludes certain evidence presented, that is COSEWIC’s responsibility, not the Report’s.

(If the Report is forced to “reflect” the designation, COSEWIC’s responsibility becomes improperly transferred to the Report. This would be treating Reports as tools to justify decisions already made.)

Therefore COSEWIC must transparently document its exclusion or rejection of scientific evidence in a Report, not hide them from the public. Anything less fails to meet the standards of scientific conduct.

Bell says that lack of transparency and lack of accountability are key contributors to problems in COSEWIC, because altering a Report would serve little purpose if minutes documented how decisions were made. But adequate minutes are not kept and there is no accountability. Even the Auditor General currently has "no legal mandate to permit [it] to carry any audit work at COSEWIC as it is not a federal government organization" (OAG spokesperson W. Cluskey, Oct. 1 1999), even though COSEWIC is substantially funded by the federal government.

Therefore, reforms are needed. COSEWIC must operate transparently and must follow its own rules. Also, the Act empowering the Auditor General needs to be amended to make COSEWIC, which is substantially supported by public funds, subject to scrutiny by the OAG and the CESD.
------------------
FOR MORE BACKGROUND INFORMATION:
“Comeau, P. 1998. 'Put cod on endangered list' - Scientist says once-abundant fish faces extinction, and DFO won't admit it. Ottawa Citizen, Ottawa. Saturday April 18, 1998, p. A1, A4.”
-- the history of the Report prior to the 1998 designation
------------------
[2]
====LETTER in plain text ====
K.N.I.Bell (B.Sc., M.Sc., Ph.D.)
25 Monkstown Rd., St. John's
Newfoundland, Canada a1c 3t2
<k.bell@ru.ac.za>
April 28, 2000

OPEN LETTER to
The Prime Minister of Canada
The Rt. Hon. J. Chretien

Re: COSEWIC, RULES, COD

Dear Mr. Prime Minister,

Are rules are made to be broken? I am sure we agree they are not.

COSEWIC (Committee on Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada) meets soon. COSEWIC was created to assess conservation status of species in natural systems we depend on. (Dependence shown by the 40,000 people thrown out of work, or the cost in (that’s a B) billions to taxpayers, when the cod fishery collapsed).

COSEWIC, funded from tax dollars, claims to operate scientifically and non-politically.

On the contrary, COSEWIC:
a. operates behind closed doors
b. doesn’t minute discussions or how each
designation is reached
c. tolerates unexplained changes of position
by the department responsible for the species
being considered
d. has no forum to resolve factual or scientific
differences
e. might deny key evidence
f. might ignore its own rules
g. might modify a Report without notification
h. even claims* the right to retroactively change the conclusions of a Report to make it fit a decision.

( * letter from Chair 14 July 99: “I will ask Dr. Campbell to expedite his finalization of the report so that it ... reflects COSEWIC's designation of the species as of April, 1998. COSEWIC has this right. ... I will suggest that your name as author be deleted from the cover of the report so that you need not be thought responsible for its conclusions.”)

Laundering Reports is dishonest. COSEWIC’s ways facilitate interference and influence. It is not accountable.
These deficiencies showed (Appendix 1) in connection with the Report on cod that COSEWIC asked me for. Manipulations delayed and influenced the designation.

Therefore: (a) COSEWIC needs to observe scientifically and ecologically sound rules and to operate ethically, transparently and accountably, or to be replaced by something that will; (b) the Auditor-General’s Act needs to be amended to bring COSEWIC within the terms of reference of the Commissioner for the Environment and other oversight bodies.

Sincerely,

Dr. K.N.I. Bell

=====end of letter. See Appendix in attached document for details.===