An investigation by The Narwhal reveals that industry and related groups, primarily from the oil and gas industry, are responsible for more than 80 per cent of Senate lobbying on Bill C-69, Canada’s proposed new environmental assessment law.

In contrast, just 13 per cent of Senate and Senate staff lobbying was conducted by environmental groups and four per cent was carried out by one First Nation.

Twenty-nine groups representing industry, business and related associations registered to lobby the government specifically about Bill C-69, which introduces new rules for reviewing major projects like mines and pipelines following the gutting of environmental assessment legislation by the former Stephen Harper government.

Of these groups, 21 went on to have 224 meetings with individual Senate members over a 16-month period beginning when Bill-C-69 was first introduced in February 2018. (To read more about how The Narwhal conducted this analysis, read our methods at the end of the article).

The unelected Senate has become a potential show-stopper for Bill C-69, which would make updates to Canada’s environmental assessment laws promised by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during the last election campaign. The bill was supported by four out of five political parties in the House of Commons.

Normally the Senate would readily approve legislation backed by a majority of MPs. But last Thursday, in a rare move that tests the limits of its power, the Senate passed Bill C-69 with 187 sweeping amendments that experts say would leave Canada with weaker environmental assessment laws than those introduced by the Harper government.

Breakdown of meetings linked to lobbying on Bill C-69 that targeted the Senate. These meetings took place between February 8, 2018 — the date Bill C-69 was introduced — and early June 2019. The Narwhal is looking at meetings arranged with lobbyists that specifically named Bill C-69 in their registrations.

Many of the Senate’s amendments mirrored requests, some word for word, from oil companies and related associations such as the industry lobby group Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP).

CAPP, which has issued press releases and written op-eds condemning the original Bill C-69, has lobbied 36 senators since Bill C-69 was introduced, some of them on multiple occasions, according to The Narwhal’s findings.

Only three environmental groups specifically listed Bill C-69 as a target for their government lobbying — the Quebec Centre for Environmental Law, West Coast Environmental Law and the Pembina Institute, a Canadian non-profit think tank focused on energy issues.

Those three groups had a total of 36 meetings over the 16-month period beginning when Bill-C-69 was first introduced by federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna in February 2018.

Foreign ownership of Canada’s oil industry

Kevin Taft, a former Alberta MLA and former leader of Alberta’s Liberal Party, said he’s not at all surprised that the oil industry has “massively outspent and out manoeuvred and out lobbied everybody else” on Bill C-69 — and Bill C-48, which would formalize a 30-year-old moratorium on large oil tanker traffic off B.C.’s north coast.

Taft said he’s struck by what he called an“Orwellian twist” and irony that Alberta Premier Jason Kenney faults “foreign-funded” environmental groups for influencing bills C-69 and C-48 when the oil industry has played a far larger role in lobbying. The oil industry, Taft said, is largely foreign-funded even though it’s based in Calgary.

Last Friday, when Kenney announced his “energy war room,” he repeated a now-familiar refrain from his campaign that environmental groups are behind a “campaign of lies and defamation” against the province’s energy industry.

Kenney, flanked by oil and gas industry representatives including the CEO of CAPP, Tim McMillan, told reporters that the “tar sands campaign” launched by environmental groups “helped to write two devastating federal bills — C-48, the ban on Alberta oil exports off our northern coast, and Bill C-69, what we call the No More Pipelines Law.”

Taft pointed out that Imperial Oil is owned by Texas-based Exxon Mobil Corp., while Canadian Natural Resources Limited trades largely on foreign stock exchanges.

China is also heavily invested in Canada’s oil industry. Calgary’s Nexen Energy is now owned by China National Offshore Oil Corporation’s (CNOOC) international division. And Chinese-owned Sinopec Oilsands Partnership — the biggest oil company in the world ranked by revenue — owns nine per cent of Syncrude, while CNOOC acquired seven per cent of Syncrude through its acquisition of Nexen.

Then there’s Husky Energy Inc., one of the largest oil companies operating in Alberta. The majority stake in Husky is controlled by the family of Hong Kong’s richest man, recently retired billionaire Li Ka-shing, who holds approximately 70 per cent of the company’s shares.

Oil industry spends ‘millions’ a year on lobbying and PR campaigns

Laurie Adkin, a political science professor at the University of Alberta, said to imply that the oil and gas industry is the victim of propaganda and the environmentalists have all the power is “an inversion of what we know factually.”

“The reality is that the oil and gas industry has huge resources to lobby and finance public information campaigns, advertising … departments dedicated to engaging in government relations, digital communications, preparation of submissions for inquiries and consultations of various kinds,” she told The Narwhal.

“We know that they spend millions of dollars a year on this.”

Adkin noted that environmental lawyers say the government’s original version of Bill C-69 is weak, pointing out that it doesn’t go far enough to reverse the Harper government’s deregulation and protect the health of Canadians and biodiversity, or to address the climate change effects of Canada’s extractive industries.

The oil and gas industry views Bill C-69 and Bill C-48 as “obstructions” to building pipelines and expanding the oilsands, Adkin said. “So they are investing a lot in defeating them and modifying them.”

Oil industry has a ‘grip on the throat of democracy’

“It’s not a coincidence that five members of Jason Kenney’s cabinet, including the energy minister, are from the oil industry,” said Taft, author of the book Oil’s Deep State, which examines why democratic governments have failed to take serious steps to reduce carbon emissions despite compelling evidence of the growing threat posed by the climate crisis.

In addition to Sonya Savage, Alberta’s energy minister, at least four other ministers in Kenney’s cabinet list extensive oil and gas experience in their government biographies.

Taft said the oil industry has “got a grip around the throat of democracy in Canada” and that he believes that anybody who thinks the Alberta government is looking after the best interests of Albertans is mistaken.

“The Alberta government is looking after the best interests of the oil industry and that’s because the oil industry has such a tight grip on most of the democratic institutions in this province. And they are working hard and deliberately to tighten that grip nationally through the Conservative party, for example, whose senators are bringing forward legislative amendments written word for word by the industry.”

“Those should be ringing loud alarm bells for every Canadian,” Taft said. “When we have a rich, powerful, foreign-controlled industry drafting our legislation for us we have a real problem with democracy in Canada.”

Industry lobbies government 16 times more than environmentalists

At press time, the full House of Commons was poised to debate a motion to accept about one-third of the Senate’s amendments and reject about two-thirds. Once the amended bill is approved by a majority of MPs it will return to the Senate for consideration, likely next week.

The Narwhal’s investigation reveals industry and related groups had far more access to politicians than environmental groups did, even before the bill reached the Senate.

In addition to tallying lobbying of the Senate, The Narwhal also looked at the total number of lobbying meetings with all government officials reported by groups registered to lobby on Bill C-69. This includes senators, members of parliament, the prime minister’s office and all other public office holders. These reports span a 12-month period.

Because the communications reports that document meetings do not specify the content of the lobbying effort, we couldn’t verify that each of these meetings directly included Bill C-69, though each group had included the bill in their lobbyist registration.

The Narwhal’s analysis found that industry and associated groups registered to lobby on Bill C-69 had 945 meetings with government officials in a 12-month period.

Breakdown of meetings linked to lobbying on Bill C-69 that targeted all government officials, including the Senate, members of parliament and other public office holders. These meetings took place over a 12-month period. The Narwhal is looking at meetings arranged with lobbyists that specifically named Bill C-69 in their registrations.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) alone reported more than 100 meetings during this time period.

In its lobbyist registration, CAPP listed — among a myriad of other topics — what it described as a “grassroots lobbying campaign to ask Senators to make sure [Bill C-69] does not pass as it stands today” as one of its lobbying activities.

Elisabeth Besson, a spokesperson for CAPP, declined to answer specific questions but told The Narwhal by email “CAPP seeks to work collaboratively with governments to meet a common goal — protect the environment, responsibly grow oil and natural gas production and strengthen the economy. We appreciate opportunities to submit comments or participate in working groups to provide our expertise, along with other key stakeholders, on a given topic.”

Taft said “for practical purposes” oil companies have unlimited resources for lobbying.

“They count their dollars by the billions whereas environmental groups count them by the thousands,” he said. “It’s a complete and utter mismatch.”

“Organizations and corporations lobby because it’s effective,” Taft said, adding that lobbying is “only one small component” of the oil industry’s broader strategy.

“It’s a strategy that, in addition to lobbying, includes advertising, legal threats, massive political donations … [and] overt political organization,” Taft told The Narwhal.

By comparison, environmental groups registered to lobby on C-69 held 58 meetings with government officials — about six per cent of the lobbying done by industry-related groups.

Indigenous groups registered to lobby on C-69 filed a total of seven communications in the same period.

Not all industry groups oppose the bill. The Mining Association of Canada has supported Bill C-69 since it was introduced, saying it would provide more certainty and is an improvement over existing legislation. The association’s CEO, Pierre Gratton, told CBC that metal and minerals mines account for more than half of current environmental assessments.

Industry is ‘in the driver’s seat’

David Hughes, an earth scientist who has studied the energy resources of Canada and the U.S. for more than four decades, said The Narwhal’s analysis clearly show “industry is in the driver’s seat.”

“The industry’s been incredibly successful in ramping up production, which is why we have a pipeline bottleneck,” Hughes said in an interview.

“If the environmental groups are lobbying to reduce production and leave it in the ground they’re incredibly unsuccessful.”

Oilsands production increased 376 per cent from 2000 to 2018, according to Hughes, who spent 32 years with the Geological Survey of Canada as a scientist and research manager.

Oil production in the rest of Canada increased 45 per cent over the same time period, he said, while conventional oil production in Alberta dropped by 34 per cent.

Canada’s net oil exports have increased by 515 per cent since 2000, Hughes pointed out, adding that “environmental groups have been very ineffective.”

As overall oil production has climbed, royalties to government have plummeted — by almost 60 per cent, or $9.5 billion, from 2000 to 2017, according to Hughes.

‘Very big disproportionality’

University of Victoria sociologist Bill Carroll, whose research focuses on the relationships between corporate power, fossil fuel capitalism and the climate crisis, said The Narwhal’s findings are consistent with patterns traced by the Corporate Mapping Project he co-directs.

“What Jason Kenney says is not only untrue in terms of the specific details of Bill C-69 but it doesn’t fit the actual reality of lobbying in a larger time frame,” Carroll said in an interview.

Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the mapping project — a partnership of several universities and civil-society organizations — examined fossil fuel sector lobbying of federal agencies and public office holders from early 2011 to early 2018.

That research showed that 260 fossil fuel companies and carbon-sector industry associations, such as the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, lobbied the federal government over that time period, registering more than 11,000 distinct lobbying contacts.

Those lobbying contacts were concentrated among a small number of those 260 organizations, with the top 20 organizations accounting for 88 per cent of all lobbying, Carroll said. Those included CAPP, Enbridge, Suncor and TransCanada Corp (now known as TC Energy).

By comparison, over the same seven-year period, 16 environmental groups were active in lobbying at the federal level, Carroll said. “Their total lobbying contacts amounted to one-fifth of what the fossil fuel sector was doing. So a very big disproportionality there.”

The most active environmental group was the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, with 628 lobbying contacts. Other top environmental lobbyists were Environmental Defence, Pembina, Nature Canada, Ducks Unlimited and the David Suzuki Foundation, Carroll said.

Fossil fuel companies and associations are lobbying in an effort to shape legislation and policy “in ways that maximize their profitability” as part of business strategies, he noted.

“There’s an ongoing strategic concern to shape policy, to in a sense bombard policy makers — including senior civil servants and politicians — with a lot of information in an on-going, really permanent campaign in which the voice of industry is dominant.”

‘Tactical’ lobbying

When a specific piece of legislation like Bill C-69 is introduced, a “lobbying window” opens up and lobbying takes on a more “tactical aspect,” according to Carroll.

Speaking to CBC this week, Cenovus CEO Alex Pourbaix characterized his industry’s involvement with Bill C-69 and subsequent amendments as an “almost unprecedented effort with government.”

Rick Petersen, founder of the group Suits and Boots, penned a strategy for killing Bill C-69 in the Senate. Suits and Boots describes itself as a “grassroots organization” of 3,700 members, founded in April 2018 by a group of investment community colleagues (the ‘suits’) who support the working families of the resource sector (the ‘boots’).

Petersen wrote that only 48 Senate votes were needed to kibosh the bill.

He theorized that the 31 Conservative Senators “will all very likely oppose C-69.” So only an additional 17 votes would be needed from the remaining 64 sitting senators, Petersen wrote on the Suits and Boots website, which published a list of senators people could call to “kill Bill C-69.”

Of the sitting non-Conservative senators, 11 are Liberal, 45 are independent and eight are non-affiliated.

CAPP’s Senate lobbying on Bill C-69 reflected the strategy outlined by Petersen. Of the 37 senators lobbied by CAPP since February 2018, only approximately a fifth were Conservative senators — eight in total, including one senator who retired in August 2018.

The majority of senators CAPP targeted for lobbying — 24 in total — were independents. CAPP also targeted two Liberal senators and two non-affiliated senators.

Suits and Boots is a non-profit organization that lists neither its total funding nor its funding sources, although its website solicits donations from “individual grassroots supporters.” The website says the group received “early support” from corporations that include Canoe Financial and Petersen Capital.

As part of the group’s campaign targeting the Senate, launched last October, Suits and Boots hired an airplane to fly over Parliament Hill trailing a huge banner for all to see.

The message was clear: “Kill Bill C-69.”

*Updated 9:20 a.m. June 14, 2019, to add the word ‘net’ to this sentence: Canada’s net oil exports have increased by 515 per cent since 2000, Hughes pointed out, adding that “environmental groups have been very ineffective.”

Research methods

Wondering how exactly we conducted this analysis?

First we wanted to hone in on the lobbying of the Senate — which was crucial in gutting Bill C-69 — so we tallied the number of lobbying efforts that specifically targeted the Senate.

To do this, The Narwhal scoured the federal lobbyist registry for all registrations that specifically named “C-69,” dating back to February 8, 2018, when federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna introduced the bill.

We then tallied the number of monthly lobby communications reports — communications reports are filed whenever there’s a pre-planned face-to-face meeting, a phone call or any other verbal communication with a member of parliament, senator or other government official — associated with those registrations, including only those that involved the Senate.

We then categorized each lobbyist into one of the categories: industry and related groups, Indigenous groups and environmental groups. A couple of lobbyists, such as Alberta Barley and the Alberta Wheat Commission, were grouped into the “other” category as they appear to be primarily lobbying on agricultural, rather than industry-related, interests.

While we can’t verify the precise content of individual lobby efforts (the communication reports contain only vague subjects, such as “environment” or “energy”), we can identify which groups lobbied Senate members the most extensively in the 16 months after Bill C-69 was introduced. It’s important to note that The Narwhal only searched for lobbyist registrations that specifically named Bill C-69 — other lobbying activities on Bill C-69 may have taken place without specifically naming the bill.

Second, we wanted to get an idea about lobbying of all government officials. To do this, we used the federal lobbying registry’s 12-month tool to compile all communications reports tied to lobbying registrations that specifically named Bill C-69.

We again searched for registrations that specifically named C-69, then tallied communications reports and grouped them using the same categories.

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.

In late May, Canada’s “energy leaders” met in Toronto for the Energy Council of Canada's Canadian Energy Summit.

The theme of the summit? “Telling the Energy Story.”

“The aim is to raise awareness and improve understanding of the many ways that the energy sector influences the economy, regional development, innovation and aboriginal partnerships across Canada,” a press release proclaimed. “We believe that improved understanding will lead to better-informed energy dialogue and energy decisions.”

Sounds nice and all, but there’s a catch: the various players in Canada’s energy debate are telling very different stories.

While industry emphasizes jobs and economic growth, environmentalists and First Nations focus on air and water contamination, climate change and aboriginal rights.

The problem for the energy sector isn’t “telling the story” — it’s the massive logic gap between their story and the very real concerns of the Canadian public.

Right now, Canada’s energy debate is like a dysfunctional family dinner, with drunk Uncle Ed blowing a gasket on one end, Aunty Hilda screaming back and everyone else staring down at their dinner plates wishing they’d stayed home.

On the one hand, you hear rhetoric about oilsands destroying the planet and needing to be “shut down” and on the other hand you hear oil execs talking about extracting as much bitumen as possible out of the ground ASAP.

“Those extreme arguments are the ones that make everybody roll their eyes,” says Ken Chapman, former director of the Oil Sands Developers Group and proponent of triple-bottom line resource development.

“And there’s about 20 per cent on one side and about 20 per cent on the other side and neither one of them will ever bridge that gap.”

Left watching the shouting match are the 60 per cent of Canadians who aren’t on either extreme, Chapman says.

“The 60 per cent in the middle don’t know who to believe, don’t know who to trust and don’t know who to rely on,” he told DeSmog Canada.

Canada’s energy debate is stuck in what’s known as a “logic schism,” in which two sides talk past each other, impeding meaningful dialogue.

“In a logic schism, a contest emerges in which opposing sides are debating different issues, seeking only information that supports their position and disconfirms their opponents’ arguments,” describes Andy Hoffman, a professor of sustainable enterprise at the University of Michigan.

“Each side views the other with suspicion, even demonizing the other, leading to a strong resistance to any form of engagement, much less negotiation and concession.”

Instead of leading the way, the federal government has been part of the problem.

In October, Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources Greg Rickford spoke to a closed-door meeting of about 40 to 50 oil and gas executives, urging them to get outside the board room and pitch projects to the public to win the public relations battle over energy.

“Enhance and expand your outreach. Communicate more effectively and clearly to Canadians with solid facts and evidence,” Rickford said, according to the documents revealed through an Access to Information Request.

Notably, Rickford mentioned nothing about improving performance in the oilsands — Canada’s fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions.

CAPP spokeswoman Chelsie Klassen told The Guardian that industry is taking Rickford’s advice and “embarking on a different level of engagement,” including “moving to a ground campaign model to activate industry supporters.”

Since then CAPP has opened an office in Vancouver to bolster its “Canada’s Energy Citizens” campaign.

CAPP is trying to spread the message that oilsands producers share values around developing the resource sustainably and transporting it safely, CAPP’s CEO Tim McMillan told the Vancouver Sun.

While there’s no doubt some truth in that statement, it overlooks the fact that CAPP has fought new greenhouse gas regulations and successfully lobbied to weaken Canada’s environmental laws — preventing Canada from “acting responsibly.”

It’s little wonder that a poll by Alberta  Oil Magazine found that fewer than one in 10 post-secondary graduates find oil and gas industry associations credible when it comes to carbon emissions.

So who can Canadians trust and how can we move beyond the dysfunctional dinner debate?

“Everbody is trying to prove each other wrong on the facts and quite frankly this is now like religious belief. And it doesn’t matter what the facts are; it’s the belief systems that are dominating,” Chapman says.

“What is open yet is the adult conversation, as opposed to the elementary school recess conversation.”

This week, well-known environmentalist Tzeporah Berman stepped into that “adult conversation” space with an op-ed in the Toronto Star:

It’s time for a new, honest conversation in Canada. It’s time to recognize that the oilsands are, in fact, a technological marvel that took great Canadian ingenuity and acumen. It’s also time to acknowledge that when we began the exploration of the oilsands we did not know what we know today.

Finally, something most Canadians can actually agree on.

 “We’re going to be in the fossil fuel business for a while,” Chapman said. “We have a responsibility to do it better. [The leadership] will have to emerge, but the leadership isn’t in two extremes.”

With the new NDP government in Alberta, Chapman sees an opportunity for a significant change.  

“There are calmer heads, cooler heads, deeper thinkers and people who understand complexity now dealing with the issue at the political level,” he said.

The first step is acknowledging that the issues in the oilsands can’t be solved with public relations. No advertising campaign, faux grassroots outreach effort or multi-million dollar messaging exercise is going to address growing greenhouse gas emissions, habitat destruction, air and water contamination and treaty violations.

Demonizing the oilsands as a planet-killing monstrosity also isn’t going to move us any closer to a responsible management regime.

The first step to recovery is acknowledging you have a problem — and what we have in in the oilsands is not a PR problem, it’s a performance problem due to a lack of regulation. And it’s high time Canadians got the conversation they deserve about how to do better.

Image: CAPP

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.

Alberta Oil Magazine just published its National Survey on Energy Literacy, the culmination of 1,396 online interviews of a representative sample of Canadians conducted by Leger.

The results are particularly interesting coming from Alberta Oil, a magazine destined for the desks of the energy sector’s senior executives and decision-makers.

Summing up the survey’s findings about “The Issues,” Alberta Oil editors write that opposition to energy projects is “not just for West Coast hippies anymore.”

Indeed. There are quite a few nuggets in the survey’s findings that are probably causing a headache or two in Calgary’s corner offices this week. We round up the Top 5.

1) Opposition to the proposed Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline is just as serious as opposition to Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline — if not more so, according to the survey. What’s more, the more highly educated citizens are, the less likely they are to support Trans Mountain or Northern Gateway. Hmph, maybe the anti-pipeline crowd isn’t all unemployed hippies after all?

2) Fewer than one-in-ten post-secondary graduates find oil and gas industry associations credible and trustworthy when it comes to carbon emissions. That shouldn’t come as a huge surprise given that industry associations like the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers have fought new greenhouse gas regulations and successfully lobbied to weaken Canada’s environmental laws.

3) Young people aren’t super stoked on the future of the energy industry. Just 16.5 per cent of people 18-34 described it as “essential,” compared to 30.3 per cent overall. What’s more, only 9.3 per cent of respondents aged 18-34 described the oilsands as “essential” compared to 18 per cent for the broader population.

4) While British Columbia has thus far been the focal point of Canada’s pipeline debate, the strongest opposition to the oil and gas sector is actually in Quebec. That’s going to have big ramifications for the proposed Energy East pipeline that would theoretically transport bitumen across that province. When asked to think of the oil and gas sector in Canada and select words that come to mind, 51 per cent of Quebecers came up with “environmental disaster.” Time for Trans Canada's PR people to pop an Advil. (Since Edelman isn't doing their dirty work for them any more …)

Screencap of Alberta Oil Magazine's National Survey on Energy Literacy.

5) The editors at Alberta Oil do some hand-wringing about Canadians' lack of “energy literacy” … although energy literacy in this case appears to be defined as the ability to answer some pretty obscure pro-industry questions.

Take the multiple choice question on how much more carbon intensive the oil produced from Alberta’s oilsands is than the average grade of U.S. crude on a well-to-wheels basis. Only 5.6 per cent of respondents chose correctly.

Ummm hold on, hasn’t there been a raging debate going on for the past few years on oilsands’ emissions intensity?

While Alberta Oil would like you to think the “correct” answer to that question is six per cent, a comparison of oilsands emissions intensities (well-to-wheels) from seven data sources to the 2005 U.S. baseline showed that oilsands emissions range from eight to 37 per cent higher than the baseline. Really, the best answer would probably be that there's a huge amount of variation and disagreement on oilsands emissions intensity.

In good news, very few Canadians can spew out the precise answers industry wants to hear to their technical questions. Oil execs probably aren’t loving that their multi-million dollar advertising campaigns appear to be falling on deaf ears.

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.