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One-third of the scientists at Canada’s foremost natural history museum
have been sacked. Managers at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa say
the action will ‘focus’ research at the museum on ‘relevant’ topics. The
sacked scientists, and one who resigned as a director in protest, say the
managers see the museum as a place of entertainment, not research.

The sackings were announced at the end of July, since when all attempts
to mediate have failed. Eight researchers, 10 scientific staff and 33 other
employees arrived at work to find themselves locked out. They were allowed
to retrieve their belongings from the building only under supervision.

Kris Pirozynski, one of the sacked scientists, complains that the CMN
has sacked its only specialists in ornithology, mammalogy, herpetology and
animal behaviour. He says that the museum’s collections in these areas will
decline if they are left unstudied.

The museum’s director, Alan Emery, who used to be a fish researcher,
told Ottawa newspapers that the CMN can afford to stop studying well-known
species to concentrate on those that are not well understood. David Baird,
the scientist who resigned from the museum’s board, says ‘the elimination
of most of the staff in vertebrate zoology . . . is to the horror of virtually
every natural scientists in the country’.

Emery says the sackings were necessary because the museum’s budget has
shrunk since 1989, from $21 million to $18 million. The museum must adopt
‘more interactive’ displays, he says, using electronics and videos, to attract
visitors ‘bombarded by movies such as Jurassic Park’.

Baird says Canada’s Museums Act instructs the museum to become the ‘national
centre for disseminating knowledge about our natural world’. Without scientists,
he says, ‘a dull, old-fashioned museum with a series of unrelated feel-good
galleries’ is unlikely to achieve that distinction.

Plans to reorganise the CMN started three years ago when the government
made it an independent corporation. Only two scientists were appointed to
its board of directors, and their recommendations ‘were generally ignored’
says Baird. Å®ÉúСÊÓƵs still at the museum are expected to be raising
$1.5 million a year by the year 2000 in outside research funding. This
means the end of academic freedom, and of the CMN’s leading role in research
into Canada’s biodiversity, says Pirozynski.