Wow.
The federal government late Tuesday night fired Linda Keen as president of the embattled Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.
In a brief statement before midnight, commission spokesman Aurele Gervais said Keen “has been terminated” as commission president.
Keen’s dismissal as president - she is expected to continue sitting as a commissioner - follows a month of increasingly bitter and politicized rancour between Canada’s nuclear watchdog and the country’s primary nuclear operator, Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.
…The Harper government directly blamed Keen for unnecessarily imposing November’s closing of the Chalk River nuclear reactor and the resulting domestic shortage of life-saving medical isotopes for cancer and cardiac diagnosis and other treatment.
It’s not clear what Keen’s firing means to her scheduled appearance this morning before a parliamentary committee investigating the affair.
In hindsight, Keen’s term as commission president was doomed in early December when Prime Minister Stephen Harper, upset over the commission’s insistence that the reactor close for a safety upgrade, said he was “troubled” by the career bureaucrat’s questioning of the government’s action on Chalk River.
Some background at Impolitical . More at Atomic Energy of Canada - wiki
Real classy, and really sleazy firing Keen around midnight.
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Whooee! Harper promised transparency and he’s delivering. This is a transparent move to undermine an arms-length regulator. Lunn’s incompetence is transparent. Cabinet’s bully-boy schoolyard tactics are transparent. Harper’s allegiance to MDS’s bottom line is transparent. Harper’s small-mindedness is transparent.
Harper has set up the environment-vs-economy framing and now he’s made it even more clear (transparent) which side he’s on. The thing is… without a healthy environment, there can be no economy.
In real life, I’m directing an amateur theatre production of Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People.” The similarities between this issue and Ibsen’s 19th century work are striking. I’m still working on designing the printed program and promotional press release. Harper and Lunn just amde that a lot easier and assured me a full house. I suppose I should be thankful.
A big troublem is that the truth is taking a backseat to political expediency and economic considerations. Harper’s minions simply deny facts and put up a smoke screen.
Dr. Stockmann and Linda Keen — fired for telling the truth. An inconvenient truth.
JB
And the townspeople keep the baths and the reactor open for economic and political expediency.
Keen’s letter to Lund is really something.
The parallels are amazing, I sincerely hope you get your full house.
For those of us who can’t attend, Project Gutenburg has Ibsen’s play online.
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2446
We rehearsed last night and I wasn’t the first to remark on the Stockmann-Keen similarities. BTW, we’re using a 1950 adaptation by Arthur Miller. He updated some of the archaic (translated) language and shortened some long speeches. Same story and still set in Norway, updated to 1930’s - 40’s.
In 1950, the red scare McCarthyism thing was on Miller’s mind.
JB