The Face of “Science Communication” in Canada
In recent years, a new genre of science communication has taken center stage in Canada. It doesn’t look like science as most people understand it—slow, cautious, and methodical. It looks like memes, hashtags, and viral posts. And it comes with the financial backing of the federal government.
Welcome to ScienceUpFirst, a “national initiative” engaged in a modern crusade against “Covid-19 misinformation” (1). Its weapon of choice? A coalition of online influencers—some with academic credentials, many without—who post curated content that aligns with public health policy, often without meaningful context, debate, or disclosure of uncertainties. The initiative’s public face is not a physician, virologist, or immunologist. It is a law professor.
Who Is Timothy Caulfield?
Professor Timothy Caulfield, co-founder and executive committee member of ScienceUpFirst, holds the Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy at the University of Alberta (2) (3). Over the past decade, he has become a familiar figure in Canadian media as a self-styled debunker of “pseudoscience”. He is prolific, outspoken, and occasionally caustic, especially on Twitter/X, where he often labels dissenters from official health narratives “anti-science”, or “conspiracists” (4).
Caulfield’s combative tone towards dissenters has earned him admiration in some circles and criticism in others. But what is beyond dispute is the financial support this tone has earned him from Canadian federal agencies— specifically, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Since 2020, his projects to fight “Covid-19 misinformation” have received over $3.3 million in federal funding (5). But as records obtained through Access to Information request A-2024-0034 filed February 17, 2025, show (6), this amount may understate the scale of the program’s resources—and the process whereby these funds were granted remains opaque.
What Is ScienceUpFirst—And What Is It Really Doing?
ScienceUpFirst was launched in 2020 as a national initiative of the Canadian Association of Science Centres (CASC), as part of efforts to increase Covid-19 vaccine uptake and to “debunk Covid-19 misinformation.” (7) On its surface, the initiative presents as a collaborative, evidence-based campaign. According to its website, it “works with a collective of independent scientists, researchers, climate and health experts, and science communicators” to “fight misinformation and promote scientific understanding.” (8)
What began as a coalition of “independent scientists”, however, quickly morphed into an online influencer factory churning out Covid-19 talking points—a sprawling social media apparatus, drawing on public money to create a steady pipeline of memes, tweets, and TikToks, all under the banner of empowering “Canadians to be champions for good science.” (9) Indeed, a closer look at how such government largesse was secured by ScienceUpFirst raises questions.
The Funding Problem: No Transparency, No Accountability
In a democratic society, public funding for research and communication should be transparent, competitive, and accountable. Yet when it comes to ScienceUpFirst, basic questions about how its multi-million-dollar budget was allocated remain unanswered. Between 2020 and 2023, federal records show that Timothy Caulfield received three major grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to fund ScienceUpFirst and related projects (10).
The first, in 2020, was a two-year, $305,366 grant titled “Coronavirus Outbreak: Mapping and Countering Misinformation.” This was followed by two consecutive one-year grants, in 2022 and 2023, of $1.5 million each, under the programs “Operating Grant: Science Up First” and “Science Up First: Together Against Misinformation” (11) — over $3.3 million in taxpayer funding for a campaign that relies heavily on digital influencers and pre-approved content pipelines.
The rationale for this extraordinary expenditure? To increase “trust” in public health messaging, especially around Covid-19 vaccination (12). If there are any other compelling reasons why Canadians should agree to disperse such sums in support of this vaguely defined war on anything that challenges official Covid-19 talking points, readers are not told.
It gets worse. As the records reveal, ScienceUpFirst leveraged an additional $1.85 million in 2022/23 alone from other sources, thanks to its claimed “impact” and “tremendous success” since 2021.” (13) This means the total resources flowing to the initiative are conservatively estimated at over $5 million—all to support a narrative-control campaign whose competition, evaluation, and conflict-of-interest processes remain opaque at best.
And in case readers wonder: how were these grants awarded? Who else applied? What were the selection criteria? The Access to Information request also sought answers to these questions: it asked for documentation of the selection process, number of applicants, conflict of interest considerations, definition of “misinformation,” deliverables, evaluation frameworks, and governmental use of project outputs (14). The response, dated June 23, 2025, offered little insight. While some documents were disclosed, large portions were redacted under exemptions for personal privacy under the Access to Information Act (15).
No public call for applications was described. No information was shared about evaluation committees—only that the funded project was deemed “urgent”, thus the review was conducted “administratively” and not “through the standard scientific peer review process.” (16) Further, no rationale was provided for the unusually high dollar amounts or the continuation of funding to the same recipient without apparent competition.
Conflicts of Interest or Business as Usual?
Particularly striking was the absence of documentation concerning conflicts of interest, even when a cursory examination of the donor base of ScienceUpFirst suggests that there are plenty of such interests. For one, the initiative is a child of the Canadian Association of Science Centres, which openly welcomes corporate and philanthropic donations—including the Weston Family Foundation, a major private grantmaker whose thematic “special projects” often align with public-health priorities (17) (18).
Another example is Senator Stan Kutcher, a medical doctor who has repeatedly spoken in Parliament about the dangers of Covid-19 misinformation—especially around vaccination—presenting early on one “successful initiative” —ScienceUpFirst— that was “bringing together hundreds of scientists, health care providers and science communicators to fight back” the threat of “alternative agendas […] not only during this crisis but in the post-pandemic world that we will hopefully soon inherit.” (19)
As recently as May 2023, Kutcher warned that “between March and November of 2021 alone, at least 2,800 Canadian lives lost to Covid-19 could have been spared, over 10,000 hospitalizations could have been prevented and $300 million in hospital costs may have been saved if not for disinformation”, especially around vaccination, “impacting health behaviours of Canadians.” (20)
So why is Dr. Kutcher’s enthusiastic endorsement of Covid-19 vaccination, and of ScienceUpFirst itself in Parliament, a potential conflict of interest for the initiative? Because Senator Kutcher—like Timothy Caulfield—also happens to be its co-founder. In fact, the Access to Information request specifically asked whether the Canadian Institutes of Health Research had considered the relationship between ScienceUpFirst and Kutcher, both its co-founder and a senator with power to influence policy—a conflict of interest—and whether any process existed to evaluate such conflicts. The released documents are silent on this point.
In other words, the Canadian public paid over $5 million—the equivalent of half a million childcare days at the $10-a-day rate Canada proudly touts as a family support benchmark (21) — for a public communications campaign that amplified government‑aligned messages about Covid‑19. Yet despite the media blitz, the agency overseeing the funding has refused to explain how or why those millions were granted in the first place.
Scientific Misinformation or “A Word We Use to Shut You Up”?
At the heart of the ScienceUpFirst initiative lies a powerful yet unexamined assumption: that “misinformation” is a clearly identifiable object, and that certain institutions and individuals are uniquely qualified to detect and eliminate it through their alleged “expertise” in this emerging field of inquiry (22). But nowhere—neither on the ScienceUpFirst website, nor in the Access to Information response—is a clear operational definition of “misinformation” provided.
Instead, ScienceUpFirst positions misinformation as anything that contradicts the dominant scientific or public health consensus— as noted by Daniel Klein, it appears to be merely “a word we use to shut you up.” (23) Indeed, the initiative does not address how that consensus is formed, who defines it, or how it evolves in the face of new evidence. This is not a minor omission. As the Covid-19 policy response revealed, public health guidance shifted significantly over time: on masks, lockdowns, vaccine transmission, myocarditis risks, and natural immunity. Positions that were once labeled “misinformation” later became accepted policy, and vice versa (24) (25).
Despite this inherent fluidity, ScienceUpFirst’s model enforces scientific orthodoxy—whatever it happens to be at any given moment. Its messaging strategy revolves around “amplifying credible information” and “debunking misinformation,” often through slick, shareable content. But the criteria used to distinguish the two remain entirely internal and undisclosed.
Science Champions or Narrative Enforcers?
One of the initiative’s most visible tools is its army of “Science Champions”—mostly self-described influencers: lifestyle bloggers, public health enthusiasts, and comedians who pledge to amplify credible information—for example, “debunking the biggest vaccine myths in just 40 seconds” (26) —in exchange for visibility and support from the campaign.
Criteria for selecting these “champions” are unclear, however: no scientific training, peer-reviewed publications, or institutional affiliation appear necessary. In fact, ScienceUpFirst proposes that “anyone aspiring to become a “Myth Busting champion” can do so—simply drawing from a “Myth Busting Starter Pack” and adopting “four essentials”: empathy, pausing before sharing, spotting “red flags”, and checking the “credibility” of sources (27). As such, the ScienceUpFirst model shifts science communication from a domain of evidence evaluation to one of public relations—from science as method to science as messaging.
This communications structure—top-down messaging combined with grassroots-style amplification—creates a paradox. It frames itself as “community-based”, yet offers no mechanism for the public to question, contest, or refine its content. An explicit question in the Access to Information request was whether there was “a process in place for the public to provide feedback or participate in the exchange of information.” The federal agency’s response provided no evidence of any such mechanism.
In this way, ScienceUpFirst not only defines misinformation unilaterally, but polices its boundaries through a closed system of self-styled “champions” who surveil acceptable speech in the name of “myth busting.” What is presented as a grassroots community is, in practice, a pseudo-community—a top-down mobilization of influencers acting as narrative enforcers. This orchestrated framework replaces public debate with broadcast messaging, transforms scientific disagreement into reputational deviance, and frames dissent not as an essential part of scientific inquiry but as a public threat to be neutralized.
Suppression by Grant Making: A New Censorship Regime?
ScienceUpFirst presents itself as a proactive effort to protect the public from dangerous misinformation. But the deeper story is not about public education; it is about enforcing allegiance to orthodoxy— as Norman Lewis has proposed in his critique of European Union policies against “disinformation” and “hate speech”, it is about attacking dissent and free speech (28). When the federal government channels millions of dollars into a single ideological direction, while excluding dissenting or critical perspectives, it creates a new form of epistemic gatekeeping: censorship by grant making.
This is not suppression by silencing; it is suppression by financial defunding, one of many tried-and-true strategies of suppressing dissent in science articulated by Brian Martin close to three decades ago (29). The government did not ban dissenting voices—it simply funded one voice to speak louder than all the others. Through lavish grants to “experts” like Timothy Caulfield, who openly derides those who question official narratives as “science deniers” or “conspiracists”, the state has effectively outsourced to the private sector the dirty work of vilifying those who question its policies.
What makes this model especially insidious is its plausible deniability. No one is technically being censored. No research is officially banned. But in practical terms, researchers critical of Covid-19 policy—whether on masking, mandates, vaccine safety, or lockdown harms—are not funded, not amplified, and not protected. Many were —and continue to be—marginalized, investigated, or publicly discredited (30). Meanwhile, those promoting government-aligned messaging, like Caulfield, were —and continue to be—elevated, enriched, and platformed.
Trust us—we are the experts
The Canadian Institutes of Health Research’s refusal to disclose how grantees were selected or how “misinformation” was defined amounts to a single institutional imperative: “Trust us—we are the experts.” But framing the problem as one of an increasingly distrusting public is a distraction. It is not that trust plays no role in science, but trust is not a substitute for debate and transparency in the scientific process. This process includes, at a minimum, asking questions, challenging assumptions, and grappling with uncertainty.
It also includes the imperative to examine funding pathways that may corrupt the scientific process. And in the case of ScienceUpFirst, those pathways were not just opaque; they were selectively funneled in one direction. The result has been an epistemic environment where scientific debate collapses into policy compliance, and as the records show, funding becomes the reward for orthodoxy enforcement. This is not a neutral science communication strategy. It is a strategic deployment of authority, with ideological litmus tests and adherence to orthodoxy substituting for open proposals, arms-length evaluation panels, and public accountability.
Following the Science or Destroying the Scientific Enterprise?
Since Covid-19 was declared a pandemic, “follow the science” has become a mantra—invoked by public officials, journalists, and influencers alike. But science is not a doctrine to be followed. It is a method of inquiry. It advances not by consensus but by challenge—by testing ideas, exposing flaws, and allowing contradictions to surface.
The very act of labeling disagreement as “misinformation” short-circuits that process. It precludes uncertainty. It demonizes dissent. And it erodes public trust by turning legitimate questions into signifiers of moral failures. In such an environment, dissent is not just discouraged—it is punished. Canada’s ScienceUpFirst campaign did not invent this dynamic, but it has strongly contributed to its institutionalization. By combining public funding, political endorsement, and influencer amplification, it has constructed an ecosystem in which “truth” is defined from the top down, and scientific contestation is recast as civic disobedience.
Nowhere in the federal agency’s response to researchers’ Access to Information request was it recognized that scientific dissent might be valuable—or even permissible. Nor was there any admission that critical perspectives leading to the generous funding of ScienceUpFirst were considered in the grant making process, or any sign that the public was invited to participate in shaping what counted as “misinformation.”
This absence is not merely procedural. It reflects a deeper failure of democratic governance: the unwillingness to accept that science, like democracy, is inseparable from conflict. Not violent conflict, but intellectual friction—the sharpening of understanding through principled disagreement. What is missing from ScienceUpFirst is not funding or followers, but the very condition that makes science possible: the space to think differently, speak freely, and be wrong without being cast out. In doing so, ScienceUpFirst achieves the opposite of what it purports to promote: not an environment where science thrives, but one where legitimacy is manufactured under threat of professional ostracization.
Grounding Critique in Research and Dialogue
As a researcher with a long-standing concern about the power dynamics driving narrative control in the Covid era, I have documented over several projects how expert authority is often asserted through fallacies, evidence-free claims, and subtle—and not so subtle—intimidation (31) (32) (33) (34) ScienceUpFirst exemplifies this model—an initiative with significant taxpayer funding, curated content pipelines, and influencer armies, yet no transparent account of its targets, selection criteria for rewards, or internal deliberations.
But why would all this matter? Well, it matters because if the public is to trust that open inquiry truly guides policy, then the funding pathways and rhetorical frameworks that shape “science communication” must be subject to public scrutiny. In the end, this is not a denunciation rooted in ideology, but a demand to protect science from bureaucratic capture, political co-optation, and commercial influence— so that the public systems we are asked to “trust” in health and other matters remain as open, rigorous, and contestable as the methods they proclaim to uphold.
The author thanks her colleagues, Regina Watteel, PhD (Statistics), and Karen Rucas, retired occupational therapist, for their highly professional and tireless work, which provided the data informing this article.
[1] https://scienceupfirst.com/
[2] https://www.chairs-chaires.gc.ca/chairholders-titulaires/profile-eng.aspx?profileId=509
[3] https://www.ualberta.ca/en/law/faculty-and-research/health-law-institute/people/timothycaulfield.html
[4] https://x.com/CaulfieldTim
[5] https://www.whiteroseintelligence.com/scienceupfirst-grant-application-records-2020-2025/
[6] https://www.whiteroseintelligence.com/content/files/2025/06/Canadian-Institutes-of-Health-Research-A-2024-0034.pdf
[7] https://twirlingumbrellas.com/work/science-up-first/
[8] https://scienceupfirst.com/who-we-are/
[9] https://twirlingumbrellas.com/work/science-up-first/
[10] https://www.whiteroseintelligence.com/scienceupfirst-grant-application-records-2020-2025/
[11] https://www.whiteroseintelligence.com/scienceupfirst-grant-application-records-2020-2025/
[12] https://www.whiteroseintelligence.com/content/files/2025/06/Canadian-Institutes-of-Health-Research-A-2024-0034.pdf
[13] https://www.whiteroseintelligence.com/content/files/2025/06/Canadian-Institutes-of-Health-Research-A-2024-0034.pdf
[14] https://www.whiteroseintelligence.com/content/files/2025/06/Canadian-Institutes-of-Health-Research-A-2024-0034.pdf
[15] https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/a-1/
[16] https://www.whiteroseintelligence.com/content/files/2025/06/Canadian-Institutes-of-Health-Research-A-2024-0034.pdf
[17] https://canadiansciencecentres.ca/our-supporters/
[18] https://westonfoundation.ca/special-projects/
[19] https://sencanada.ca/en/senators/kutcher-stan/interventions/560906/4
[20] https://sencanada.ca/en/senators/kutcher-stan/interventions/605712/28
[21] https://www.canada.ca/en/economic-development-southern-ontario/news/2024/06/healthy-meals-for-up-to-400000-more-kids.html
[22] https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/
[23] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4465604
[24] https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/cdc-considering-recommending-general-public-wear-face-coverings-in-public/2020/03/30/6a3e495c-7280-11ea-87da-77a8136c1a6d_story.html
[25] https://www-nytimes-com.ezproxy.library.yorku.ca/2020/03/31/health/cdc-masks-coronavirus.html
[26] https://scienceupfirst.com/science-champions/
[27] https://scienceupfirst.com/misinformation-101/myth-busting-starter-pack/
[28] https://brussels.mcc.hu/publication/manufacturing-misinformation-the-eu-funded-propaganda-war-against-free-speech
[29] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261948082_Suppression_of_Dissent_in_Science
[30] https://www.guelphtoday.com/local-news/controversial-u-of-g-prof-called-as-vaccine-expert-in-family-court-fight-6088356
[31] https://www.mdpi.com/2673-8112/4/9/101
[32] https://ideas.repec.org/p/osf/socarx/fwvem.html
[33] https://journals-sagepub-com.ezproxy.library.yorku.ca/doi/full/10.1177/13634593231204169
[34] https://pubmed-ncbi-nlm-nih-gov.ezproxy.library.yorku.ca/39416898/
(Featured Image: “Timothy Caulfield CSICon 2018 Scienceploitation Pop Culture’s Assault on Science (and why it matters)” by Karl Withakay is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.)
