Stop a random person on the street. Ask them for the first thing that pops into their head when they think of Alberta’s oilsands.

Unless they’re an industry analyst or an over-enthused real estate agent turned corporate shill, chances are that they’ll describe either buffalo roaming on a restored tailings pond or helicopter shots of open-pit mining. Individuals are more likely to describe a visual element of the resource as opposed to, say, the barrels per day of oil or annual megatonnes of greenhouse gasses the region produces.

It’s this notion — that pictures, videos and other media representations often have extremely powerful influence on discourse about the oilsands — that compelled Patrick McCurdy to launch the MediaToil project.

“The premise of my work is that media is a site of social struggles,” McCurdy, an associate professor in the department of communications at the University of Ottawa, told DeSmog Canada. “It’s a battle for our imaginations and what we think about a certain topic and the actions we’re willing to take. I wanted to try to map that.”

Working with a two-year grant from the Social Sciences and Humanity Research Council, McCurdy and his team identified all the different stakeholders involved in the oilsands (of which there are many: corporations, industry associations, media, environmental non-profits, Indigenous groups), combed their websites and created an Excel database with the links.

Online Oilsands Campaigns Can Disappear from Web

McCurdy said one of the key challenges his team encountered was the lack of digital posterity of online oilsands campaigns and ads.

Unlike analyzing something like historic tobacco advertising — which is often still available via microfilm or print — many digital campaigns are no longer live, meaning companies and industry organizations can effectively eliminate controversial points in history from the record.

Take the 2010 television campaign by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) which compared the consistency of oilsands tailings waste to yogurt: the Sierra Club of Canada filed a complaint to Advertising Standards Canada, arguing that it misrepresented the toxic nature of tailings. CAPP eventually revised the ad, removing the yogurt reference.

“But this ad no longer exists,” McCurdy said.

“The challenge is it has an impact on the public imagination. Of course, the Advertising Council ruled in CAPP’s favour, but no matter — if you wanted to for your own interest watch this ad, it doesn’t exist. It’s been removed.”

New Public Database Charts Decades of #Oilsands Advertising #cdnpoli #bcpoli #ableg #oilandgas https://t.co/g5si0itH5B

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) September 13, 2016

Rise of ‘Apocalyptic Imagery’ in Oilsands Campaigns

Despite such challenges, he says it’s possible to detect trends in communication strategies.

Back in the 1980s, depictions of the oilsands emphasized “images of accomplishment by industry: man over nature, ability to make money from dirt,” McCurdy said.

But that kind of rhetoric saw a decline in the early 2000s, when companies like Suncor attempted to balance community responsibility with environmental burdens (which McCurdy calls “caring for toads”) and didn’t engage in the “trend ad warfare” we see now.

Everything changed following the rise of “apocalyptic imagery” in 2008 and 2009 by organizations like Greenpeace, which executed huge banner drops and other image-heavy events. (The Syncrude duck disaster of 2008 also provided visual fodder for organizations unsatisfied with the province’s approach to environmental regulations.)

Industry and its network of associations first responded with photos of smiling CEOs backdropped with lush forests and freshwater. But they quickly ditched that strategy, opting for what we’re stuck with now: lifestyle rhetoric, boosterism and appeals to potential supporters instead of engagements with critics.

Screenshots from Canada Action, left, and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers Raise Your Hand campaign, right.

Meanwhile, Indigenous communities and organizations tend to be significantly underrepresented, with the exceptions of media events like the Tarsands Healing Walk and appearances in ads by environmental organizations like WWF or Greenpeace.

“Looking at these ads certainly tracks and captures these shifts in strategies,” McCurdy said. “For me, the value of tracking this over time is you can look at what are the political decisions that have been made, what are the milestones in the timeline of the oilsands that relate to this?”

70-Page Comic Book To Be Published Alongside Database

But McCurdy wanted to broaden the project even beyond the database and the peer-reviewed papers that will eventually come, as it was important to think of another way to engage the public given the debate currently resembles a “red team vs. blue team thing.”

For that, he contacted Nicole Marie Burton and Hugh Goldring of Ad Astra Comix on Twitter to create a 70-page graphic novel loosely based on the themes of the MediaToil project.

Goldring said the work will follow the experience of two young photographers in Edmonton that work for advertising agencies representing “opposite sides.”

“It tracks their conflict of conscience,” he said. “The whole reason we picked people in advertising in the first place was that it provided a way to look at the production of these images.”

Goldring added that while the database of images is important, it’s McCurdy’s work that applies the larger contextual frame.

“Patrick’s work in a larger sense is in the way the images are produced and what the larger semiotic meaning or context of the work that’s being put out by these ad agencies is.”

Burton said the graphic novel will feature a fair bit of ambiguity, and is ultimately intended to help provoke conversation and provide discussion topics for bigger picture questions about the framing and discourse of the oilsands.

The comic will come out sometime in 2017, wbe available for free online as a downloadable PDF. In the meantime, McCurdy hopes that the public will point out “blind spots” in the database and explore the ads and fact sheets further.

Energy East Debate Further Emphasizes Need for Analysis of Visual Rhetoric

And while data collection was only conducted up until 2015, the goal is to continue it. Especially given the country’s increased focus on TransCanada’s proposed Energy East pipeline. McCurdy said it’s “a true battle over statistics” that’s falsely presented as a national unification project that will reduce the country’s dependency on foreign imports.

A popular image that’s made its way around social media features a series of flags of countries that Canada currently imports oil from, with the implication that such imports would cease with the construction of Energy East. But recent reports suggest that a great majority of oil shipped east via the pipeline would actually be exported to the United States.

It’s these kinds of projects — along with the way that solar and wind technologies are visually communicated by fossil fuel companies — that McCurdy hopes to explore during his 2017 sabbatical.

“I think it’s time we actually try to pick apart this persuasive communication which is a proxy, very much, for public debate,” he says.

“It really clouds our ability to think critically about these things and becomes a back-and-forth. That’s part of the reason for the comic, and part of the reason for the database is to have some stuff out there for the public as opposed to just tucking stuff away in peer-reviewed academic journals.”

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After a rough year of collapsing oil prices and the embarrassing dethroning of Alberta’s longtime Progressive Conservative government, the oil and gas industry could use a win. The latest campaign from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) was probably designed to be one.

Alas.

Developed as part of CAPP's ‘Energy Citizens’ movement, the ‘Raise your Hand’ campaign is well-designed and clearly expensive. Online and off, it features smiling multiracial faces with hands raised — overlayed with hand-drawn outlines of patriotic maple leaves. There are cheerful videos, interactive bus shelter ads and an online submission form to stay connected. It even has a hashtag (#ryhcanada), the extremely limited Twitter impact of which must be giving at least one advertising executive an ulcer right now.

As Mark Hume noted in the Globe and Mail this weekend, an ad campaign that attempts to co-opt patriotism for its own ends is hardly something new. NGOs have done it for years. So have McDonalds, Molson's beer and Roots. And yet, as Hume says, “CAPP’s slogan — 'Raise your hand because you are proud of Canada’s oil and natural gas' — doesn’t quite have the same ring as one that urges you to raise your hand against racism, ignorance or disease.”

Hume writes that the campaign could have been more successful, had it not been launched in the same week as a massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, which reminded “Canadians — and especially British Columbians where two new oil pipelines are proposed — what happens when one of those .001-per-cent accidents happen.”

I’m not so sure.

While the campaign is not a failure on par with the spectacular collapse of BC Ferries ‘#NameAFerry’ contest, its inability to spark public enthusiasm is not surprising. Even without the Santa Barbara oil spill, it’s reasonable to wonder if pipelines and patriotism fit together as naturally as the industry would have us believe. After all, it’s hard to raise our hands in blind allegiance when the failures and questionable behaviour of industry executives are so hard to ignore.

• Raise your hand if you remember that two years after it became public, CNRL is still unable to stop a slow leak at its Cold Lake in-situ drill site.
• Raise your hand if you recall how Plains Midstream — the Canadian analogue of Plains All American (the company whose failed pipeline spilled all that oil in Santa Barbara) — was fined $1.3 million for two giant pipeline spills in Alberta and was recently ordered to undergo an independent review of their safety procedures?
• Raise your hand if you remember how the industry leaders in oil and gas fought hard to keep employing temporary foreign workers, limiting opportunities for those smiley Canadians featured so prominently in their advertising?
• Raise your hand if you’re doubtful of the capabilities of Western Canada Marine Response Corporation touted by CAPP in the campaign after its slow response to Vancouver's relatively minor English Bay oil spill?
• Raise your hand if you saw the news this week that federal Industry Minister Greg Rickford spoke to an October 21, 2014 closed-door meeting of CAPP executives encouraging them to "work harder and spread the message of the oil industry?"

I could go on.

If recent polling is correct, 72 per cent of Canadians want to see more jobs created in the renewable energy industry. Fifty-eight per cent of Canadians go even further, wanting to see oil and gas use phased out in favour of renewable solutions. And even the Harper government has publicly acknowledged that climate change demands at least a little immediate attention.

So to the folks at CAPP and their marketing agency of record, may I humbly suggest an edit to your ask? Something a little more measured, a little more Canadian.

Raise your hand if you acknowledge that while oil and gas and other extractive industries are a big part of the Canadian energy mix now, they don’t have to be forever. That pipelines fail and transporting oil and gas is inherently dangerous. That if Canadians want to meet our climate goals without having to buy carbon credits from other countries, we need to start investing more in renewables.

Raise your hand if you agree we all deserve a more nuanced conversation about Canada's energy future.

Image Credit: CAPP

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Well, the disclosure statements are in and we now know (sort of) how much was spent trying to sway voters during B.C.’s local elections in November.

In addition to disclosures on how much candidates spent during the elections, there are also filings for more than 100 organizations registered with Elections BC as third-party sponsors. This is the first time third parties have been forced to register with Elections BC and report their spending — and at least two resource companies are in the mix.

Big third-party advertisers include Woodfibre LNG, which spent $18,248 on newspaper and radio ads in Squamish, where the company is proposing a liquefied natural gas export terminal. The company spent 17 times what it would be allowed to spend per capita during a provincial election, according to analysis by Integrity BC — a non-profit organization that campaigns to reform B.C.’s electoral finance.

That’s because B.C. still has no limits on spending during local elections — despite a task force recommending limits be implemented back in 2010.

Integrity BC’s Dermod Travis notes that all that spending didn’t work out so well for Woodfibre LNG. Patricia Heintzman won the mayor's chair with a spend of $11,842, defeating the more LNG-friendly incumbent Rob Kirkham.

KGHM Spends $8,600 on Ajax Mine Letter

Meanwhile in Kamloops, KGHM International spent $8,605 on a mailing about its proposed Ajax Mine — an open-pit copper and gold mine proposed within Kamloops city limits. The company writes in a post on its website that the letter was sent to a “group of Ajax supporters.” The letter included a list of all candidates running for Kamloops city council and listed their public positions on the Ajax mine.

“At a cost of $8,605 that was either one very large group or one very long letter,” Travis notes. “Didn't work out so well for the mine either when the results came in.”

Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Spending Remains a Mystery

As is often the case, the biggest story may be in what we don't know.

In October, Elections BC ruled that Kinder Morgan didn’t need to register as a third-party sponsor despite launching a major advertising offensive about its proposed Trans Mountain oilsands pipeline to Burnaby during the election. Due to that ruling, Kinder Morgan’s spending during the election will forever remain a mystery.

Photo: My Sea to Sky

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From now until November 30, if parents and teachers want to support Lower Mainland schools, all they need to do is fuel up at Chevron gas stations within their district.

As part of a program called Fuel Your Schools, for every 30 litres of gas purchased, Chevron donates $1 to participating school districts. The program has been in effect in North Vancouver since May when the Board of Trustees decided to opt in. Chevron has ads up in its gas stations informing drivers of the program.

North Van was the fifth district in B.C. to join the program, joining West Vancouver, Burnaby, Surrey and Coquitlam. If the fundraising goal is reached — a total of $565,000 to be split between the five districts — B.C. drivers will have purchased just under 17 million litres of gas.

In spite of the incentive to buy more gas and to buy it from Chevron — the company behind the proposed Pacific Trail pipeline that would carry one billion cubic feet of natural gas from Summit Lake to Kitimat — Victoria Miles, spokesperson for the North Vancouver School District (NVSD), told DeSmog that the district believes a relationship with Chevron “in no way impedes” its sustainability mandate.

“When it comes to energy use, we want to ensure that we are using less and creating greater efficiencies in all of our operations. Sustainability in all areas of our operations is a goal we are actively working to realize as part of our 10-year strategic lan," she said via e-mail.

The program is a collaboration between Chevron and My Class Needs, a non-profit organization that crowdsources money for schools to fund projects. The funding prioritizes STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) projects and teachers have the option of applying for funding for particular programs or projects. Teachers report back on how the funds are used.

Miles was also quick to point out that Chevron isn’t permitted to advertise in classrooms and supplies purchased through the program won’t be branded. However, presentations given to children in Surrey classrooms featured Chevron advertising materials.

A presentation given at Bear Creek Elementary School features Chevron Fuel Your Schools material. Source: Surrey604.com

“We recognize the funding source is an act of corporate social responsibility that the company does not have to engage in with a portion of their profits. The company offers their support to public education, as an option for teachers who might value supplementary funding for a resource that can enhance their educational practice and classroom engagement,” she said via e-mail. 

Students and school faculty in Orange County, California, pose with Chevron advertising materials. Source: Irvine News Blog.

Carolyn Pena, president of the North Vancouver Teachers Association (NVTA), is skeptical about the promise to keep branding out of school. After learning of the program, she saw a promotional video made by teachers in the Surrey district that featured Chevron Fuel Your School posters as well as the program's cartoon car logo.

“That's what we’ve seen of the program, so it just makes us wonder,” she said

Pena only found out about the program when teachers who were sent information about it contacted her to express their concerns.

“We weren’t consulted at all. Not only were we not consulted, we didn’t even know the decision was taking place in order to provied any feedback whatsoever."

"We didn’t know for months afterward,” she said.

While Chevron claims that parents were not told about the program and have in no way been pushed to buy gas from Chevron, Pena said it puts teachers in the difficult position of potentially having to explain the program to students while also teaching about environmental responsibility.

“Fundamentally, what we need is a level of public education funding that allows schools to function without the need for corporate donation. This undermines the call for adequate public funding.”

The Vancouver School District has refused to be part of the program on the grounds that Chevron’s partnership with My Class Needs, which has oversight over fundraising projects, amounts to corporate influence on curriculum. With municpal elections coming up on Nov. 15th, the issue is a contentious one both for the mayoral race and school board trustee elections.

The North Vancouver Teachers Association has passed a non-binding motion asking teachers not to participate in the program.

David Lavallee is one of the many teachers in the North Vancouver School District with serious concerns about the program. As a teacher on call, he could be requested to teach in a variety of schools, all of which might participate in the program differently.

When it comes to the messaging of oil companies like Chevron, Lavallee has done his homework. A documentary filmmaker when he’s not in the classroom, Lavallee is the creator of White Water Black Gold, a film about water use in the Alberta oilsands.

With a Master’s degree in psychology, Lavalee formerly researched child development and how children respond to advertising and corporate messaging. Logos or no logos, he believes Chevron has no business in public schools.

“Climate change is on the news all the time. I remember as kid myself listening to stuff on the news and trying to make sense of it and not having the tools to make sense of it.”

Lavallee says he has even seen adults struggle to separate fact from fiction when it comes to the oil and gas industry. And in spite of years of exposure to the tactics multinational corporations use to keep the oil flowing, he said he still sometimes runs into confusion himself.

“It’s too much for kids,” he said. “I believe the classroom should be a sacred space where kids don’t have to face advertising of any kind.”

Image Credit: A Chevron representative speaks to children in a California elementary school. Photo from Richmond Confidential, a University of Berkley journalism website.

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Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver is attending the East Coast Energy Conference this week, where he said: “Canada is emerging as a 21st century energy superpower – unmatched in reliability, responsibility and potential.” His comments bring Canada’s attempt to situate itself at the centre of North American energy security to the forefront.

The statement was made while addressing relations between Canada and the U.S., the world’s largest trade partnership exchanging $700 billion annually, according to a press release put out by Natural Resources Canada (NRCan).

“As the global middle class grows, so too will global energy demand. Canada can meet that demand: we have solid economic fundamentals and unprecedented energy wealth,” Oliver said.

Mark Jaccard, professor at Simon Fraser University’s School of Resource and Environmental Management, says the title "energy superpower" means little more than Canada’s reliance on fossil fuel exports.

“Presumably it means that a country receives significant revenues from energy exports,” he told DeSmog Canada. “Linking this reality to the word ‘superpower’ might best be described by adjectives such as hubris and hype.”

Jaccard added that Canada’s rush to become an energy superpower “is like trying to become a major exporter of…social harms” because fossil fuels are the “primary cause of catastrophic climate change.”

“The leading independent scientists and economists with expertise in the climate issue would agree on this,” he said.

Federal Green Party leader and B.C. MP Elizabeth May also reacted strongly to Oliver's comments, saying, “there isn’t much in Joe Oliver’s statement that passes any kind of sniff test for veracity.”

Canada’s policies on oil development, especially in the oilsands, amounts to “putting all our eggs in the bitumen basket,” May says.

There’s a carbon bubble, she said, referencing the work of economist Jeff Rubin, “and Canada’s economy is going to tank if all we’re doing is associating ourselves with the oilsands.”

A real 21st century energy superpower would have a much more balanced energy portfolio, according to May.

“You want to have a diversified economy. You want to be investing in renewables. You want to have the latest technology in solar and geothermal and tidal. You want to be as energy efficient as possible,” she said.

“I really can’t say strongly enough that, even if you leave out the environmental downsides of our policies, and leave out climate as a concern, these are not the policies of an energy superpower.”

‘Responsible Resource Development’ Campaign

Oliver highlighted the success of the Harper government’s "responsible resource development plan," which is celebrated by government and industry as strengthening environmental protection while streamlining resource development. Opposition parties, environmental organizations and First Nations criticize it for weakening crucial environmental legislation and environmental assessment procedures to expedite energy development.

The plan includes the elimination and weakening of Canada’s environmental legislation through omnibus budget Bill C-38 and millions of dollars spent on energy-sector advertising.

NRCan budgeted $9 million in 2012-2013 for sleek advertisements that showed Canada’s resource development in a positive job-friendly and environmentally sensitive light.

A NRCan spokesperson told DeSmog Canada the responsible resource development advertising campaign “serves to inform Canadians of the importance of responsible resource development by providing specific facts about measures taken by the government to protect the environment and grow the economy.”

NRCan's advertising budget for 2013-2014 is $8 million.

In addition, the government launched an international stakeholder and outreach campaign to "build prosperity for Canada" designed to “raise awareness that Canada is a secure, reliable and responsible supplier of energy and other natural resources,” NRCan said.

The international campaign is designed to challenge “misinformation” and ensure “a fact-based public dialogue about the development of Canada’s natural resources.”

The total advertising budget is $24 million for two years. The U.S.-targeted Go With Canada website is a part of this international campaign.

Screen shot from the Go With Canada website.

Credibility Gap

A government-commission study led by Leger Marketing found the taxpayer-funded "responsible resource development" advertising lacked some credibility with audiences in early 2013. Focus groups raised criticisms regarding “the lack of ‘hard’ facts” in the ads, the Leger study says.

According to NRCan, the plan “has strengthened environmental protection, made reviews of major resource projects more timely and predictable and provided greater certainty for investors.”

Yet critics of the plan are concerned the Harper government’s efforts to speed up the pace of energy development projects and supporting infrastructure like Enbridge's Northern Gateway oil pipeline and tanker project are being done at the expense of the environment — an expense the advertising campaign is meant to conceal.

“They’ve spent a lot of taxpayers money to tell taxpayers and ordinary citizens how lucky we are to have such bad policies,” May said.

“We’ve had television advertising to tell us that, thanks to Stephen Harper, we’re going to have double-hulled tankers. The slightest bit of reality check from anybody would uncover that for decades the world international standards have prevented the conception of anything but double-hulled tankers. There hasn’t been a single-hulled tanker anywhere near Canadian waters for decades because there are very few left in the world and none are used by responsible shippers. So, again, the arrogance behind the propaganda machine.”

NDP Treasury Board critic Mathieu Ravignat expressed concern at the government’s ads’ similarity to those produced by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), Canada’s largest oil and gas lobby body.

“If you put the ads next to each other — the government ads and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers ads — what’s going on is damage control,” he told the Canadian Press. “We’ve got an industry which doesn’t have the best reputation, we’ve got a government helping part of the industry in order to sell itself as responsible.”

The NRCan press released states “Canada is taking significant action to reduce its GHG emissions.”

As DeSmog Canada recently reported, Canada has no current climate legislation and, according to Environment Canada, is not en route to meeting is emission reductions targets under the Copenhagen Accord.

The press release also says “the long-term trend for greenhouse gas emissions per barrel in the oil sands is downward, falling by 26 per cent between 1990 and 2011.” That may be true, but it fails to take into account the growth in oilsands production, making the sector the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada.

Canada’s reliability as an energy producer collapses when you consider the country’s oil exports within the context of a warming world, Jaccard says. The danger of resource development in Canada doesn’t have to do so much with the local effects of production, he said, but global emissions.

Climate change “swamps” any other concerns, he says.

With files from Indra Das.

Image Credit: Government of Canada

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Northern Gateway launches new TV ad promising a “better pipeline.” We say change one letter and you’ve got a deal.

By: Heather Libby & Kai Nagata

Kai: Remember Enbridge’s “disappearing islands” video, the one where the company deleted 1000 square kilometres of inconvenient, tanker-sinking rocks and reefs? Or the watercolour “Pathway to Prosperity” animations, spoofed by then-Province cartoonist Dan Murphy? Those ads were so galling, people booed them in movie theatres. Well, the new ones are even worse.

Heather: After Greenpeace and Coastal First Nations leaked the scripts for Enbridge’s schmaltztastic new Northern Gateway campaign last week, we assumed it meant Enbridge would scuttle their latest marketing plans. We were half right. They yanked the most ridiculous ad, “Janet and the Orca,” after realizing what a liability it would be.

Kai: But here’s the thing about pipeline companies. They can’t, by their nature, take no for an answer. And their answer to every problem is “throw more money at it.” So when 65% of a province says no to the Northern Gateway Pipeline, really, Enbridge’s only move is to bombard us with more ads.

Heather: Last night the new campaign’s flagship ad started airing in primetime on BC television stations. As expected, it’s fantastic. There’s soft-voice narration, instagram-worthy vignettes of people doing real-life things, gorgeous shots of our stunning coast and a soaring soundtrack.

Kai: There’s just one problem. It’s an ad for a pipeline that will jeopardize everything you see on screen, paid for by a reckless company still desperately trying to clean up its massive bitumen spill in the Kalamazoo river in 2010.

Heather: We started thinking. What if Enbridge could put all that money and creativity into an ad campaign for something British Columbians actually want?

Kai: Looking at Enbridge’s original scripts, we quickly realized that changing a single letter could turn Northern Gateway into a delicious project people would love. That’s right, a butter pipeline.

Heather: So what’s it going to be folks? A bitumen pipeline, or a butter pipeline? We want to hear from you. Click to vote at: ButterPipeline.ca. Something tells me we can find more supporters for the idea of a delicious butter pipeline, than a diluted bitumen pipeline.

Kai: After all, we’re the country that proved that an onion ring could gather more Facebook fans than Prime Minister Stephen Harper. So please, point your friends toward ButterPipeline.ca and send Enbridge a clear message: if you want to build a pipeline across BC, it better be a butter pipeline.

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This week, under questioning from opposition MPs, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver confirmed that his department intends to spend up to 16.5 million dollars on advertising in the upcoming year. Further details on how this taxpayer-funded PR campaign for Canada's natural resources will be run were lacking.

Mike De Souza writes for Canada.com, that Oliver "also declined to provide specifics on a training program, worth up to $500,000, for his department's scientists and other officials, 'designed to help them communicate with the public and to do so in a way that is accessible to the public.'"

Speaking to a special committee studying spending estimates in the House of Commons on Tuesday evening, Oliver confirmed that much of the advertising would be focused on promoting the proposed TransCanada Keystone XL pipeline linking Albertan tar sands oil to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast.

This comes as no surprise, with Prime Minister Stephen Harper trumpeting the multibillion dollar Keystone project's virtues in the US, and his government fighting an EU initiative to label tar sands oil as highly polluting. As De Souza writes, "Canadian and American oil companies are lobbying the Obama government to approve the pipeline in order to support oilsands expansion and jobs."

Oliver reportedly declined to say how much money was being spent in the US and Europe for aforementioned lobbying against climate-change legislation. He "also declined to say whether any advertising money would be spent to promote renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power."

Opposition MPs didn't take kindly to the plan. NDP natural resources critic Peter Julian apparently denounced it as "political advertising," saying that it represents a 7,000 per cent increase in advertising budgets at Natural Resources Canada since 2010-2011. Julian also expressed concerns about the initiative to train scientists on public speaking, especially with the government already under scrutiny for preventing scientists from speaking about research on climate change.

De Souza quotes Julian as saying, "The idea that there would be some kind of formal media muzzling of scientists is something that most Canadians would profoundly disagree with." He took issue with funnelling taxpayers' money into this kind of "media muzzling."

Liberal Marc Garneau also called the promotion of tar sands oil development "irresponsible" when the government still doesn't have concrete answers on the potential impact of tar sands crude spills in the Pacific Ocean. That such spills could have long-term repercussions is clear. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently issued an order to Enbridge asking them to clean up lingering pollution from a 2010 pipeline spill in Michigan.

When asked about the results of research into the issue, Oliver said that there's no way for him to "know what the precise results of that research would be."

Oliver acknowledged that "climate change is a pressing global problem," but added that the "nature of our policy response is different from that of the opposition parties." One presumes the Harper government's "policy response" is to channel its resources into promoting the very industry that contributes so heavily to this "pressing global problem."

De Souza adds that Natural Resources Canada "emailed Postmedia News explaining that details of the $16.5 million in advertising would be published at some point in the future. It also said that the special training program for scientists and staff was required under the government's public relations policy and that the program's budget would not exceed $400,000 at Natural Resources Canada."

Image Credit: Government of Canada / Wikimedia Commons

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With Prime Minister Stephen Harper in New York courting US business leaders and promoting the Keystone XL pipeline, it's perhaps unsurprising to hear that his government has nearly doubled its spending on advertising the Albertan tar sands since last year.

Suzanne Goldenberg writes in the Guardian, that according to the Canadian Press agency, the Harper government "has increased its advertising spending on the Alberta tar sands to $16.5m from $9m a year ago." The government's strategy includes television advertising and "high-profile ad buys" like sponsoring Politico Playbook, an influential political journalism site frequented by administration officials.

Harper was in New York City as part of the push to entice the US into supporting the Keystone pipeline and exports of crude oil from the tar sands. Last week, Harper was at a discussion and question and answer session at the Council on Foreign Relations, with the tar sands and the pipeline high on the agenda.

This onslaught of tar sands promotion by the Canadian government comes at a time when the Keystone project's completion is still uncertain. If completed, the pipeline will pump up to 830,000 barrels of crude oil a day from the Albertan tar sands to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast. The Obama administration makes its final decision on whether or not to approve the pipeline later this year.

Aside from winning approval for the project in the US, Canada has also been resisting a EU proposal that would designate fuel from tar sands oil as high polluting compared to conventional fuels because of studies confirming its higher GHG emissions.

Goldenberg quotes natural resources minister Joe Oliver as saying that the EU proposal is "discriminatory, it's not based on science and it would potentially hurt Canada's ability to access markets for its resources." Oliver's claim that the proposal isn't based on science is best refuted by the fact that it is, in fact, based on a Stanford University scientific study. His second claim is probably more accurate, if applied to the resource in question–high polluting tar sands oil.

Oliver reportedly assured CBC Radio that "Canada will keep developing its natural resources for export to the United States in a way that ensures the environment is protected." He also stressed the importance of presenting "key facts on our strong environment record and long-standing energy relationship to American decision makers and opinion leaders."

It's difficult not to think what the $16.5 million being used for tar sands advertising could do to strengthen Canada's "strong environment record" for the future. It remains to be seen whether or not the Harper government's efforts will pay off when it's time for President Obama to make a decision on the pipeline.

Image Credit: Emma Cassidy / Flickr

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The Harper government has been using taxpayer money to sharpen its marketing toolkit in the debate over natural resource development. According to a recent report from Léger Marketing, Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) commissioned the company to perform pre- and post-testing of their $9 million Responsible Resource Development advertising campaign.

Aside from revealing the extraordinary cost the Harper government is willing to foot in order to assure that the country gets a sunny picture of its economic policies, the report provides a unique behind-the-curtain view of the mechanics involved in selling energy and resource development to Canadians.

The reasoning behind the move to hire a marketing firm seems relatively innocuous: “It will be important in this environment to encourage Canadians to become better informed about the development of Canada’s natural resources and the critical impact to Canada’s economy that contributes to our economic growth and jobs, and through generated tax revenues helps to maintain important social programs like health, education and pensions.”

However, the report reveals Léger used focus groups to test not only comprehension and recollection of the message in the ads, but also “the extent to which Canadians were impacted by the language, content and context of the advertising concepts.”

The first round of ads was tested on people who represented “a good mix of ethnic, educational and socio economic backgrounds” in Vancouver, Prince Rupert, Moncton, Mississauga, London and Quebec City in November 2012. In total, 2000 Canadians were interviewed.  

The first two concepts entitled “Let’s do Both” and “Canada’s Moment” highlighted the ways in which Harper government’s Economic Action Plan (EAP) was balancing environmental impact and job creation.

This first round of commercials were said to leave subjects feeling confused. The images they saw didn’t give respondents an adequate idea of how they might personally benefit from resource development. Worst of all, they felt that they couldn’t see how the government would balance resource development with environmental protection. They believed “the concepts were missing hard facts or evidence regarding the claims presented.”

This prompted NRCan to request another $4 million for their advertising budget to produce a second round of ads. These three new ads offered a much more pleasant and focused picture of Canada’s natural resource policies, with heavy emphasis on oil extraction and transportation.

This time they got the desired result. Focus groups in Vancouver, London and Quebec City “readily understood the messages conveyed by the ad concepts and mostly viewed them as uplifting, many spontaneously saying that it made them proud to be Canadian.”

The third of the new ads, “Environment and Safety” even “reassured many people that the Canadian government was doing something to protect the environment for future generations.”

Without changing a single policy, the EAP went, in the eyes of focus groups, from hurting the country’s environment to saving it.

Never mind that several of the examples presented in the commercials—shipping safety along BC’s coast, oil pipelines in Ontario—refer to issues that are being hotly debated on ethical grounds. The stirring nationalistic tone banished any questions.

Using Canadian identity to sell environmentally questionable resource development is nothing new. Many are familiar with the advertisements from Cenovus that played before films at Cineplex movie theatres last year. Alongside stirring images of the Canadarm and the majestic peaks of the Rocky Mountains, it told us that the word Canada is “spelled with a can — not a can’t,” implying that if we don’t use all the technology available to extract and sell our oil, we've failed at being Canadian. 

Vision of Alberta's tar sands, as artistically rendered by Cenovus.

NDP Treasury Board Critic Mathieu Ravignat told the Canadian Press the government ads are nearly indistinguishable from ads released by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, Canada's largest and most powerful oil and gas lobby. 

"If you put the ads next to each other — the government ads and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers ads — what's going on is damage control," Ravignat said.

"We've got an industry which doesn't have the best reputation, we've got a government helping part of the industry in order to sell itself as responsible."

The difference here is that our government is paying for the EAP advertisements with our taxes. Sure, it’s important for our government to keep us up to date but if, as the interviews uncovered, most Canadians already understand “the importance of natural resources for Canada’s economy and for job creation,” what is the function of this kind of advertising?

Is the Harper government using its advertising budget to inform us of neutral facts or to sell us on practices that it knows make us queasy?

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.