(Hat tip: Canadian Blue Lemons).

I have to think that Stéphane Dion should have done his homework a bit more carefully when he selected Kirsty Duncan as the candidate for Etobicoke North. She has one major opus, a book entitled Hunting the 1918 Flu: One Scientist’s Search for a Killer Virus which is presumably the basis for her selection as a candidate.

It would seem, though, that Dion didn’t bother to read the book review that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine. (The official full text is behind a subscriber firewall, but it’s reprinted as an “editorial review” on the amazon.com product page. Let me reproduce a few passages:

To conduct this work, Duncan had to gain the permission of the Norwegian authorities and recruit a team of virologists and other technical experts. She found that the former task was much less difficult than the latter.

It is clear that many of the scientists she invited to join what she referred to as “my team” regarded this young Canadian geographer with a mixture of contempt and respect. On the one hand, she was perhaps her own worst enemy, coming across as a vain, self-centered person full of her own importance and sanctimonious to a degree. It is also clear why some of the scientists she invited to join her team found some of her behavior irritating . . .

. . . At one stage of the work at the exhumation site, Duncan ordered that no one should talk to the media except herself. Imagine, then, her feelings when one of the scientists was caught near the buried bodies, hiding in a ditch, making a tape recording for the press . . .

[Discussion of a competing project:] Hultin’s success was enormously distressing to Kirsty Duncan. She referred to him as “the Boy Scout” and when they later met refused to talk to him. Her ungracious behavior is understandable. Duncan’s bloated, over-funded, overpublicized expedition, which had taken six years to organize, had failed, whereas someone else, working on his own, quietly and with no publicity and little in the way of funds, had succeeded. . . .

I want to stress that this is an editorial review, not something planted by a partisan. I also want to point out that William Graeme Laver wrote his review based almost entirely on the reading of this work. He concludes:

Duncan describes in some detail almost every communication between herself and the scientists on her team. I have never met Duncan, but I have known some of the flu virologists for a long time, and I found her descriptions of their individual characters accurate and fascinating. Whether the average reader would feel the same, I have no way of knowing.

Now — if Dr. Duncan is to be credited with one thing, it’s the apparent candidness with which she wrote about her relationships with her team members. At the same time, given how she managed her project, how she got along with the members (who are probably just as qualified as scientists working for Environment Canada), and how the project as a whole compared with an alternative work, potential voters really should ask if they want this sort of person as an MP, let alone a Minister.

UPDATE (23 Feb 18h48): Steve Janke has done more — a lot more — research on the good Doctor, and I have to think that the only way Dion could have thought about naming her as a candidate would be mere casual acquaintance. I figure he must have attended some of her workshops as a Minister, heard her speak and answer questions, figured that she could do well in the House, and extended an invitation to run in the closest available riding. Any casual background checking by Dion’s staff must have been superficial at best.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 12:51 and is filed under Libranos, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.