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Friday Fun: Using my librarian superpowers for good rather than evil

By jdupuis on October 23, 2015.

As you can all imagine, I'm quite pleased to see the backside of the Harper government on their way out the door. Of course, the Liberals have promised a lot but only time will tell how serious they are about fixing the science-related stuff that they've promised to fix. I'll definitely be watching that and keeping track here on the blog somehow somewhere.

That being said, I was quite gratified that my various pro-science advocacy efforts in general and my war on science chronology post in particular were quite popular and widely used during the election campaign.

Obviously all the things that I've done advocating for science- and evidence-based decision-making in Canada, I did them because I thought they were important and useful things to do, not because I wanted to be congratulated or celebrated for them. That doesn't make me any less happy and proud to be congratulated and celebrated for these things, of course.

So in the spirit of Friday Fun, I though I'd share some of the congratulation and celebrations with you, my readers.

Starting with this astoundingly wonderful linking to my post from this article in the Guardian: How science helped to swing the Canadian election. Yes, the Guardian.

Things got so bad that scientists and their supporters took to the streets. They demonstrated in Ottawa. They formed an organization, Evidence for Democracy, to bring push back on political interference in science. Awareness-raising forums were held at campuses throughout Canada. And the onslaught on science was painstakingly documented, which tends to happen when you go after librarians.

How cool is that!

And there was a fair bit of very kind reaction on Twitter too, a bit of which I'm including below.

And continuing with the article I did just before the election in Metro News, Canadian government approach to science reads like satire, which was also very well received on Twitter, a sampling of which is below.

With this tweet in particular being one of my favourite in the post-election period:

Apologies for all the self-back-patting, but sometimes a guy just can't resist.

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Canadian war on science
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