Category Archives: President’s Reports

By Chris Wilson (acting CASCA President)
(Cassiopeia – Winter 2022)

The CASCA Board held two regular monthly meetings since my last report, as well as our semi-annual meeting in early December, which this year was two sessions of 4 hours each. Progress has been somewhat slower on some aspects of the Board’s Action Items list due to extended absences of both the President and the Secretary in November, which also resulted in the need to cancel our regularly scheduled November Board meeting.

On the committee and administration side, over the past 3 month, the Board has approved new Board representatives to the Ground-based Astronomy Committee (GAC), Long Range Plan Community Recommendations Implementation Committee (LCRIC), and Equity and Inclusion Committee (EIC). We also approved new members for LCRIC and the CASCA-ACURA TMT Advisory Committee (CATAC). We also approved a request from the Awards Committee to move the deadline for nominations for 2023 awards to January 15, 2023. Individual Board members are also taking some Indigenous Awareness Training by working to complete the course “4 Seasons of Reconciliation” offered by Reconciliation Education.

The Board met with several members of the Westar Subcommittee of the Education and Public Outreach (EPO) Committee at our regular meeting in September. Our discussions focussed on the recommendations in their report, particularly around the potential to hire an EPO coordinator and what funding could be available to support such a hire. We identified the need to determine how much annual funding is expected to be available for Westar programs, a discussion that is complicated somewhat by the recent economic turmoil affecting investments in general. The Board expects to conclude its review of the Westar finances and to be in a position to pass some more concrete information along to the Westar subcommittee early in the new year.

The Board dealt with a number of requests from the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and IAU members related to membership transfer, inactive members, deceased members, and new applications for IAU membership. Unfortunately, a couple of requests to apply for IAU membership came in too close to the December 15 deadline to be dealt with before the IAU’s application portal closed. If you missed applying for IAU membership this year (which is free to individuals), please watch for an announcement in fall 2023. For the Digital Research Alliance of Canada (formerly Compute Canada), we have identified Catherine Lovekin (chair of CASCA’s Computation and Data committee) as the second CASCA contact for DRAC. This helps ensure that emails from DRAC are not missed, and that a person with more expertise in this area than your current President is available to attend DRAC meetings.

On the financial side, the Board approved an extra increase for the CASCA administrator’s salary for 2023. This supplemental increase of 2.5% is in recognition of the fact that inflation in Canada is running much higher than in past years. The Board also approved financial support for the annual Canadian Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics (CCUWiP), which is being held in person for the first time in 3 years at the University of Regina. Finally, starting in January, the Board will be actively contacting CASCA members who are 1 year in arrears with their dues.

Regarding the CASCA website, we had a glitch in mid-November that was linked to our website being moved to a new IP address. Apologies to anyone who was impacted by this problem (which of course happened over a weekend!), and thanks to our webmaster, Don Hutton, for fixing it promptly once it was identified. Vice-President Adam Muzzin has been taking the lead on updating parts of the website that had gotten out of date. The 2022 award winners should now all be up to date on both the French and English sides, as should the committee members. If you spot any further missing information, please let Adam or me know.

As required by our By-Laws, a list of the Board positions that will be open for election at the 2023 June Annual General Meeeting (AGM) was sent by the Board to both the Nominating Committee and to the general CASCA membership. There will be 3 open positions: 2 for Director and 1 for President. Please consider standing for election yourself or encouraging other good candidates to stand. Suggestions can be sent to Rob Thacker, who chairs the Nominating Committee, or via the nomination form to the CASCA secretary, Rob Cockcroft.

Just as a reminder, the next CASCA AGM will be held June 12-15, 2023, in Penticton, B.C. Over the next 6 months, the Board will be looking for an institution to host the subsequent AGM in spring of 2024.

There has been big news for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) over the last two months. SKA1-Low will be located on the traditional lands of the Wajarri Yamaji, who have lived there for tens of thousands of years. On November 5, 2022, the Wajarri celebrated the registration of an Indigenous Land Use Agreement for the SKA-Low site. Construction commencement ceremonies were held in both South Africa and Australia on December 5, 2022 to mark the official start of construction. In Canada, the absence of any news about the SKA in the government’s Fall Economic Statement was not unexpected. For more information, please see Kristine Spekken’s article in this issue.

The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) has now been accepted into NSF’s queue for Large Facilities (known as MREFC), and so NSF’s Preliminary Design Review (PDR) of the TMT has begun. The PDR is an important gateway that must be passed in order for the project to proceed to the final design phase, which includes a full cost review, firm governance model, and site selection. A final design review is expected to take place roughly 18 months after the PDR. In additional news, the U.S. Department of the Interior announced that it will require formal consultation with the Native Hawaiian Community. Within Canada, CATAC has advised that Canada not host the Science Forum proposed for 2023, that had been delayed for a couple of years due to the pandemic, but recommends Canada host it in the near future, pending a return to more normal travel conditions and a successful NSF review. For more information on these and other issues, please see Michael Balogh’s article in this issue.

Finally, the Canadian Coalition for Astronomy has had a quiet few months, aside from filing a pre-budget submission for the October 8 deadline, which included recommendations for both SKA and the proposed CASTOR space telescope. For more information CASTOR, please see the article by Pat Côté in this issue.

I want to close by noting members of our community who have been honoured elsewhere. Congratulations to: Daryl Haggard (McGill), who has been awarded the 2022 Rutherford Memorial Medal in Physics from Royal Society of Canada (RSC); Ue-Li Pen (CITA and University of Toronto), who has been elected a Fellow of the RSC; Nick Cowan (McGill) and Renée Hložek (University of Toronto), who has been elected to the College of New Scholars of the RSC; and the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) team, who have been awarded the Brockhouse Canada Prize for Interdisciplinary Research in Science and Engineering from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC).

Wishing you all a good break over the holidays and a smooth start to the next semester,

Chris

By Chris Wilson (CASCA President)
(Cassiopeia – Autumn 2022)

The summer is generally a quieter time for society business, as many of us take the opportunity for some vacation and to attend conferences and (dare I say it) do some research. Many of our committees do not meet unless something urgent comes up. The Board skipped its July meeting but had a productive meeting on August 17.

As a regular feature of these reports, I plan to provide a short summary on the steps that the Board is taking to improve and clarify CASCA procedures and governance, for itself, for its committees, and for the membership as a whole. Over the past 3 months, the Board has re-constituted its Action Items list and is starting to work its way through items systematically. There are a lot of items, many of them simple housekeeping, but everything takes some time and attention. The Vice-President and I are each circulating a written report to the Board ahead of the monthly Board meeting, so that the meetings themselves use less time for simple reporting of events and have more time for discussion. CASCA committee membership is now mostly complete, with just a few members remaining to be finalized for LCRIC and CATAC.

The Coalition for Canadian Astronomy has been fairly quiet over the summer. We took the opportunity of the extensive media coverage around the JWST early images to send LRP2020 and a cover letter to about 40 ministers, staff, and department officials in July. As we do every year, we are working on a 2023 pre-budget submission, which is due October 8. When Parliament resumes Sept 19, I expect Coalition activities will ramp up; we had no meetings with government over the summer.

In TMT news, the National Science Foundation announced the beginning of the scoping process for the TMT project. To quote from an AAS email August 22, “The scoping process is a public comment period for identifying issues to be analyzed during the creation of the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) and for consultation under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act to evaluate anticipated effects on historic properties on the summit of Maunakea, Hawaiʻi Island, Hawaiʻi. While the scoping process is a standard procedure for all NSF large facilities construction, NSF is also working to implement the community astronomy model outlined in the most recent decadal survey. To that end, NSF also invites the public to comment on NSF’s plans to engage the public in its EIS and Section 106 compliance processes through review of and comment on NSF’s Draft Community Engagement Plan.”

Other reports on progress with our major new initiatives (TMT, SKA, CASTOR, etc.) can be found elsewhere in this issue (or the 2022 Summer Solstice issue).

I want to close this article with a few thoughts on the subject of land and consent, a topic that is the focus of Recommendation #1 from LRP2020 and was the focus of a policy document that the LCRIC shared with the membership in advance of the May 2022 CASCA AGM. It is important to acknowledge my own settler background, as that background affects my perspective on this topic.

LRP Recommendation #1 states (in part): “We recommend that the Canadian astronomical community (e.g., ACURA, CASCA, and NRC-HAA) work together with Indigenous representatives and other relevant communities to develop and adopt a comprehensive set of guiding principles for the locations of astronomy facilities and associated infrastructure in which Canada participates. These principles should be centred on consent from the Indigenous Peoples and traditional title holders who would be affected by any astronomy project. “

In thinking about the topic of land and consent in the context of LRP Recommendation #1, probably the most important question that arises is who gives consent for a new facility to be built on Indigenous lands.

UNDRIP, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, gives the answer: Indigenous peoples and communities. This is admittedly a very general answer and does not attempt to answer questions such as: which Indigenous peoples and communities; who speaks for those Indigenous peoples and communities; what to do if there are disagreements between the groups who are asked to consent to a project; etc. But it is appropriate that UNDRIP does not address these details: it is up to the Indigenous peoples and communities to decide if and how they wish to give consent.

A secondary question that follows from the question “who gives consent” is who decides/judges/acknowledges that “free, prior, and informed consent” has been received from Indigenous peoples and communities for a new facility to be built on Indigenous lands.

In Canada, the act that established the National Research Council (NRC) mandated that NRC should “operate and administer any astronomical observatories established or maintained by the Government of Canada”. So, for projects in which Canada is involved at a national level, the decision on whether consent has been given belongs with the Government of Canada and its agencies such as the NRC.

So you may ask, what is our role, as Canadian astronomers, in the process of land and consent? Personally, I feel that it is important that Canadian astronomers be reasonably confident that consent has been given for a new facility. This confidence helps to ensure that Canadian astronomers continue to support the facility that is being constructed. Confidence can be gained by educating ourselves: by reading reports and emails shared by the facility, by CASCA and its committees or by NRC; by attending informational webinars; by participating and asking questions; and so on. As a community (through CASCA and its committees, for example), we also have a role to play in working with Indigenous peoples and communities, as well as other organizations such as NRC, ACURA, etc., to help develop the guiding principles called for in LRP Recommendation #1. The policy document circulated by LCRIC in spring 2022 is an example of the type of work that is required from our community.

But ultimately it is not up to us as individual astronomers to make the call that consent has been given. We don’t have the necessary expertise (social, political, etc.) or resources. We don’t have the connections with the local Indigenous people and communities, certainly not for new telescope facilities that will be based in distant countries.

I think the important point is that we, the Canadian astronomical community, have said through LRP2020 Recommendation #1 that it is essential to obtain consent from Indigenous peoples and communities for new facilities that Canada is involved in. The Government of Canada, through NRC and other avenues, is taking this statement from our community very seriously in evaluating potential new national telescope facilities. Our role as individual Canadian astronomers is to stay informed about what is going on, to participate and ask questions, and to continue to educate ourselves.

Wishing you all a safe fall semester,
Chris

By Chris Wilson (CASCA Acting President)
(Cassiopeia – Summer 2022)

I would like to start this President’s report by welcoming the new members of the CASCA Board: Adam Muzzin as Vice President, Rob Cockcroft as Secretary, and Renee Hlozek and Karun Thanjavur as new Directors. Lewis Knee has been acclaimed to a second term as CASCA Treasurer, while Laura Parker and Julie Hlavacek-Larrondo are continuing in their third year as Directors. Thanks to all of you for being willing to serve! Thank you also to the outgoing Board members: Judith Irwin (Secretary), Ivana Damjanov (Director), and Etienne Artigau (Director). A special thank you to Erik Rosolowsky (Acting Vice-President) and Rob Thacker (Acting President) for stepping up to serve in these important CASCA roles last summer.

As those of you who attended the CASCA Business Meeting in May will know, I have agreed to step in to serve as CASCA Acting President for 2022-2023. Like Rob Thacker this past year, I am in this position under Bylaw 9.1, and will not be continuing in this position beyond the 2023 AGM. Thus, in 2023 we will look to elect a new President, as well as two new Directors. More information about the elections, including how to nominate someone or be nominated yourself, will be circulated later this year.

As I have been in the Acting President position for just over a month, this message will provide a short update on a few key areas. I plan to provide a more extensive discussion in my fall message, once I have had more time to review what the CASCA Board has on its “to do” list.

Coalition activities continue to focus on the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), where things appear to be progressing well. The SKA is now one year into construction of SKA Phase 1 and continues to evolve rapidly. Canada’s scientists and engineers are participating in SKA through March 2023 via a co-operation agreement between NRC and the SKAO. To continue our leading role in SKA construction deliverables such as the SKA1-mid correlator will require the Canadian government to commit to construction and operations funding quite soon. Please refer to the excellent article by Kristine Spekkens for more information on the SKA.

Another important initiative that is gaining significant momentum is CASTOR, a Canadian-led optical-UV space telescope and the highest priority in space astronomy in the 2020 Long Range Plan (LRP2020). The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) held a virtual Canadian Space Exploration Workshop June 14-16, 2022, which I am sure many of you attended. The workshop provided an opportunity to discuss ideas for Canadian space exploration over the next 30 years and will serve as input to CSA’s planning process.

The LRP Community Recommendations Implementation Committee (LCRIC) has continued their hard work over the past three months. They hosted a well-attended webinar on “Including Indigenous voices in astronomy education” at the end of March. They have drafted a very important policy paper on land and consent (LRP2020 Recommendation #1) as it relates to new astronomical facilities that has been circulated to the community and was presented and discussed in a special session at the CASCA AGM. Sharon Morsink has taken over as chair of LCRIC for 2022-23 and I look forward to working closely with her and the rest of the LCRIC as they work to move the societal recommendations from LRP2020 forward.

I hope everyone has a healthy and productive summer,

Chris