A world-class freshwater research station in Northern Ontario is being junked by the Conservative government—which claims at the same time that it’s looking for a buyer.

Make sense? Only if removing the windows and doors from that house you’re trying to sell makes sense.

The $2 million cost of the Experimental Lakes Area lab—a mere one twenty-fifth of Tony Clement’s gazebo largesse, about a tenth of what has been spent to date on Harper’s Economic Action Plan bumf, and only twice the cost of shipping Harper’s cars over to India—is minimal. But that’s not the point.

Harper wants the lab shut down. It has been discovering the wrong things. Facts, once again, have been getting in the way of his agenda.

The Harper government has gone so far as to refuse journalists permission to visit the area. The Globe & Mail, to its credit, toured the place anyway. Gloria Galloway, a professional journalist of the old school, is all over this story, and we’ll be hearing lots more from her about it, I expect.

Some folks are still trying to save the research station, and I wish them well, but when Harper seeks to destroy, he normally succeeds.

Even the Conservative party godfather Preston Manning sounded the alarm a few days ago, if delicately, referring to the government’s “perceived weakness” on the environment. Maybe he’s next on Joe Oliver’s “dangerous radicals” hitlist.

But “perceived,” Preston? Come on. Harper’s war on the environment is, unfortunately, all too real. The unchecked vandalism continues—and all Canadians, and our descendents, will undoubtedly pay the price.