United States President Donald Trump’s Aug. 1 firing of the head of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics with a bad-faith allegation of manipulated data is another critical attack by the American government on the independence of statistical and regulatory agencies, and on knowledge itself. Trump’s administration has declared war on the independent agencies that produce scientific knowledge on health, weather, climate, the environment, the economy, and space by cutting funding and cancelling programs, firing workers, and demanding that the science produced reflect Trump’s ideologies. The White House is dismantling the very state and academic institutions that made America a global data and knowledge powerhouse. 

Alongside this ideological war on science, the U.S. government is razing its regulatory agencies, slashing decades of work regulating the environment and food safety in mere months. 

The Environmental Protection Agency, for example, is rolling back wastewater regulations for oil and gas development; lowering air quality standards, including on hazardous air pollutants; and—in a time of climate emergency—fast-tracking fossil fuel projects. 

Meanwhile, America’s food system is in danger because of deep cuts and job losses at the federal agencies that oversee food safety, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Agriculture, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Policy expert Sarah Sorscher, at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, contends the U.S. “federal food safety system is teetering on the brink of a collapse.” 

This wholesale destruction of knowledge and regulations is not solely a problem for the United States. It affects every country that relies upon U.S. data and regulations to inform their policymaking and regulatory efforts.

In Canada, Prime Minister Mark Carney, who was elected with a strategy of ensuring this country’s sovereignty and values in response to Trump’s repeated threats of making Canada a 51^st state, had said very little publicly about the collapse of the U.S. regulatory state. Carney’s priorities are signing a comprehensive trade deal with America, bolstering Canada’s military spending, and dramatically cutting federal spending and the federal civil service. 

Carney’s priorities, as other critics have noted, reflect a business-as-usual response to a now-authoritarian U.S., not a recognition that the Canada-U.S. relationship has fundamentally changed.

Commentators have usefully pointed out that Canada can no longer rely upon America to comply with existing trade agreements, let alone new ones. However, what’s largely missing from public debates on Canada’s future with our nearest neighbour is a consideration of what that relationship looks like when U.S. agencies’ data cannot be trusted and regulatory agencies are becoming partisan entities of an authoritarian government. 

Canada needs a sharp pivot away from its traditional regulatory reliance on the U.S. 

Consider Canada’s dependence on American health institutions for tracking infectious diseases, including avian flu and tuberculosis, and dealing with pandemics. What are our plans in response to the White House’s cuts to their public health sector? This is a critical situation given that those cuts have crippled America’s responses to public health emergencies, posing “immediate and long-term risks to the health of neighbouring countries and to global health,” according to a recent editorial in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. This country, the editorial contends, needs to strengthen public health and disease surveillance systems nationally. 

More ambitiously, Canada could step in where the U.S. is abdicating its role in public health. Trump plans to cancel US$500-million in funding for mRNA vaccines, including those that have been safely and successfully used to counter COVID-19. Canada could pour funds into domestic scientific research to attract key scientists, academics and health professionals to ramp up vaccine research and production here at home. This would also require extensive and sustained investment in our research funding programs and university system, which has been hobbled by decades of underfunding. 

Now is not the time for the Canadian government to be slashing the federal public service, which will weaken regulatory capacity domestically. Instead, we have an opportunity to boldly re-envision our country by strengthening our academic and scientific research and, crucially, building a world-leading data and regulatory capacity.  

Natasha Tusikov is an associate professor at York University‘s Department of Social Science where she examines the intersections amongst law, crime and technology. 

The Hill Times