Canada Action, a non-profit organization that bills itself as a “grassroots movement” in support of the country’s natural resources industry, received a $100,000 payment from a major oil and gas developer, according to disclosures made to the Government of Canada.

The funding from ARC Resources, a conventional oil and gas company with operations in Western Canada, was listed in a company report submitted to Natural Resources Canada in May.

The sources of funding behind Canada Action and the organization’s prominent founder and spokesperson, Calgary-based realtor Cody Battershill, have been in question since the group began generating attention in 2015 for its vocal support of Canada’s extractive industries — including its t-shirts and stickers displaying the slogan “I love oilsands.”

While our previous reporting identified deep ties between Canada Action, the oil and gas industry and conservative party campaigners, this is the first time industry funding of the organization has been publicly disclosed.

Canada Action is part of a growing chorus of industry advocacy groups that frame Canada’s environmental movement as anti-Canadian and motivated by foreign financial interests. In its early stages, Canada Action was described as a citizen-led initiative. A 2014 National Post article called Battershill a “one-man oilsands advocate” in a “PR war” to defend the country’s energy sector — which was facing growing scrutiny amid evolving social and environmental values, particularly in regards to Indigenous rights and climate change.

These new details about the finances of Canada Action come to light as attacks on the environmental movement are moving from the fringes to the mainstream, with Alberta Premier Jason Kenney facing scrutiny for investing $30-million into a so-called “war room” to combat misinformation, target environmentalists and defend the province’s energy industry.

In response to questions from The Narwhal regarding how much funding ARC Resources has provided to Canada Action, ARC Resources’ senior vice president of finance Kristen J. Bibby said: “This was a one-time payment to support Canada Action’s initiatives to promote Canadian energy.”

A screenshot of a document filed by ARC Resources showing a payment of $100,000 made to Canada Action. Click here to see the report in full.

Canada Action and Cody Battershill did not respond to multiple requests for comment by publication time.

Bob Neubauer, researcher with the Corporate Mapping Project, told The Narwhal the disclosure of industry funding behind Canada Action has the potential to “shred their credibility.”

“Canada Action has always made their claim to fame by saying, ‘hey, we’re just a bunch of grassroots concerned citizens’ … The fact that they’re receiving a hundred thousand dollars from industry — it torpedoes their own descriptions of who they are and what they do.”

Who is — and who funds — Canada Action?

For years, questions have swirled around the presumed corporate sponsorship of Canada Action — questions the organization has always, in one way or another, successfully dodged. 

In a 2015 interview with the program Conversations That Matter, Battershill offered this by way of explanation for Canada Action’s support: “I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars out of my own pocket.”

“There is nothing astroturf or fake about my passion for my country,” he told interviewer Stu McNish. “I’ve put my money, my time and my actions where my mouth is.” McNish did not directly ask Battershill whether or not he received industry or political funds.

In my own reporting, when I asked Battershill directly about the sources of funding behind Canada Action, he told me: “We accept donations from individuals and we sell Canada Action merchandise to support our campaigns.”

In early 2019, earth scientist Dave Hughes pressed Canada Action to disclose its funding in a column published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Hughes wrote: “When Canada Action was asked for funding sources … it provided no response.”

Yet onlookers have noted Canada Action’s impressive rise since it was formally registered as a non-profit society in 2014 and publicly launched at the Woods Buffalo Brewing Co. in Fort McMurray. 

“The oil crash of 2014 to 2015 created such a massive problem for the industry and such a massive level of unemployment, it created a crisis not just for industry but for communities that are dependent on industry,” Neubauer, who is also a lecturer in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, told The Narwhal. 

Canada Action took hold of a broad public narrative — espoused by pro-industry groups across the country — that oil and gas is good not only for these communities but critical to maintaining the Canadian way of life.

Neubauer said that, along with other researchers tracking the influence of pro-industry groups with the Corporate Mapping Project, he saw Canada Action “cultivating factoids and turning that into memes and talking points and promoting the heck out of that online and directing people to take action.”

Canada Action is prolific in its production of memes disseminated through Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. It has published more than 150 posts on Facebook since the beginning of the year, and while many feature photos of individuals sporting the group’s for-sale t-shirts, the vast majority are sleekly designed and branded graphics that emphasize some specific benefit to Canadians from industry while stoking a sense of national pride.

The group has more than 100,000 followers on Facebook, 18,000 on Instagram and nearly 27,000 on Twitter. Yet some of Canada Action’s proxy groups, which include Pipeline Action and Oilsands Action, have gone on to overshadow the original audience — Oilsands Action now boasts more than 315,000 followers on Facebook and close to 70,000 on Twitter.

A screenshot of Canada Action’s Instagram page.

Starting around 2015, there was a proliferation of advocacy groups organizing industry support both online and offline, Neubauer said, using familiar tricks of political campaigning that are “kind of close to the environmental movement’s ladder of engagement,” he said. 

Many of these groups, such as Canada’s Energy Citizens, which is a project of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, were easily identified as “astroturf” or fake grassroots organizations manufactured by the oil and gas industry to have the appearance of citizen-led initiatives.

“But with Canada Action, we didn’t have any proof of industry funds so we didn’t call them astroturf — but they were playing the same game,” Neubauer said.

The ‘about us’ section on Canada Action’s Facebook page says the organization was first conceived in 2010 and “is dedicated to changing the narrative about our world-class natural resource industries.”

“Canada is a leader in protecting people and the plant [sic] — we should be proud of our record from coast to coast,” the statement reads.

“Our mandate is to encourage Canadians to take action and work together through fact-based, non-partisan and positive conversations to get the message out far and wide in a proactive manner.”

“The world needs more Canadian energy.”

But beyond the pro-industry mantra, Neubauer said, Canada Action has played a very vocal role in criticizing the environmental movement and furthering conspiratorial narratives about how the environmental movement is funded.

In a 2019 opinion piece published on EnergyNow.ca, Battershill said his organization responds “rapidly and regularly to false statements of many activists,” including David Suzuki, Tzeporah Berman, Bill Nye, Leonardo DiCaprio, Neil Young and Jane Fonda.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B0CvfF4A3CY/

“Writing a false or misleading narrative attacking the Canadian oil and gas industry might cause some initial confusion in the minds of the public” and can have long-lasting effects in the “political consciousness,” Battershill wrote.

Neubauer said the new revelations about Canada Action’s industry funding paints their criticism of the environmental movement in a new light. 

“They’ve been spinning the notion that environmental issues in general are a conspiracy by the well-heeled elite and celebrities and the United Nations and trying to destroy the lifestyle of the working class,” he said.

“The fact that they spend a lot of their time talking about shady funding … I think the funding pipeline, excuse the pun, for the environmental movement is far more transparent than what you’re looking into right now.”

ARC Resources funding of Canada Action disclosed unintentionally

Canada’s little-known Extractive Sector Transparency Measures Act (ESTMA) came into force in 2015, requiring natural resource companies like ARC Resources to disclose payments made to governments in relation to the extraction of oil, gas and minerals.

According to documents filed by ARC Resources to the ESTMA database on May 27, 2020, a payment of $100,000 was made to Canada Action Coalition under the category of “bonuses.”

The disclosure appears to have been made unintentionally, according to Tommy Morrison, data associate with the New York-based Natural Resource Governance Institute.

“Canada Action Coalition doesn’t fit the description of an eligible payee under ESTMA’s preparation guidelines, and no reporting company in Canada has ever named it as a payee,” said Morrison, who analyzes data disclosed within the database.

“Among all the data we’ve collected as part of ResourceProjects.org, it is irregular to see disclosure of a payment to a non-governmental payee,” Morrison told The Narwhal. “We do not have a position on transparency of industry funding of non-profits in Canada, but generally we recommend greater openness in the sector.”

Non-profits are not required to disclose their sources of funding, even if they are registered as non-profit societies with the federal government, as is the case with Canada Action. 

(The Narwhal is a registered non-profit society in British Columbia and voluntarily discloses all donations over $5,000.)

In the disclosure documents, the Canadian government is listed as the “payee” for the $100,000 amount and Canada Action Coalition is listed as the agency that received that payment. 

Michael Grainger, policy analyst with Natural Resources Canada, which manages and maintains the disclosure database, also indicated the disclosure was made in error. While companies are required to list payments to governments in the form of taxes and royalties, payments to Canada Action would not have to be disclosed, even though the non-profit is a society registered with the federal government. The $100,000 payment appears to have been listed in a case of over-disclosure.

“The Canada Action Coalition is not associated with the Government of Canada, and NRCan may have accepted the report in error,” Grainger wrote in an email to The Narwhal. 

He added that Natural Resources Canada contacted ARC Resources “and asked them to amend their report as soon as possible. An amended version should be posted online shortly.”

Grainger said that any inquiries pertaining to payments to the Canada Action Coalition should be directed to ARC Resources.

On its website ARC Resources describes itself as a “Canadian oil and gas producer committed to delivering strong operational and financial performance and upholding values of operational excellence and responsible development.”

The company was founded by ARC Financial Corp., a Calgary-based private equity firm “specializing in the Canadian energy industry.” ARC Financial is also behind the ARC Energy Resources Institute which describes itself as “dedicated to researching complex, interrelated trends that influence the energy business, including financial, political, environmental, technological, social and economic forces.”

William Carroll, sociology professor at the University of Victoria and one of the leads of the Corporate Mapping Project, said he describes the networks linking industry with Canadian finance, think tanks and so-called citizen groups are called “a regime of obstruction.”

“What we’re trying to reference there is the multifaceted nature of corporate power and influence. It extends in different ways and certainly funding Canada Action is important — as is CAPP’s project Canada’s Energy Citizens — all of these extractivist, populist elements are one kind of initiative that speaks to a certain audience, in terms of mobilizing a kind of grassroots base.”

Industry funding behind initiatives that are positioned as citizen-led or grassroots is often hidden from or not made apparent to the public. 

“It’s not a genuine grassroots initiative and yet it appears that way and I think a lot of ordinary folks concerned about jobs and drawn into this kind of discourse accept it as a kind of people’s movement,” Carroll said.

Canada Action evolves to support more than oil and gas

In recent years, Canada Action has branched out from its base support for the energy industry to champion other major natural resource sectors including mining and forestry as well as pipelines and agriculture. 

T-shirts with the messages “I love Canadian forestry,” “I love Canadian pipelines” and “I am Canadian energy” can now be purchased on the organization’s website.

A Canada Action graphic taken from an email showing the organization’s broadening support for Canadian industries.

According to Canada Action the organization’s campaign influence has grown steadily, too. According to an end-of-year newsletter sent in December 2019, Canada Action was behind “the largest pro-oil and gas rally in Canadian history” that brought out “some 4,000 supporters.”

The group claims it hosted more than 30 “resource rallies” across Canada and “proudly participated in the first ever Indigenous-led pro-pipeline rally for Trans Mountain held in Vancouver on June 18, 2019.”

Canada Action also says the organization is focusing its efforts on central Canada, “particularly on young Canadians who are keen for credible, balanced and non-partisan information on Canadian energy and natural resources.”

Neubauer said there is a confluence of factors that have led to the current moment, where an organization like Canada Action can dramatically impact public narrative around the natural resource industry.

“The economy is toast, their finances are toast, they’re hurting — but they’re also looking for someone to blame. It’s attractive to blame someone like David Suzuki, Naomi Klein and Greta Thunberg because that’s part of a broader pro-oil, conservative narrative,” he said.

That conservative discourse dovetails with a broad resurgence of populism, especially right-wing populism around the world, Neubauer said, pointing to the work of groups like Canada Proud and Alberta Proud and their efforts to influence elections. 

“I think in some ways people like Battershill and groups like Canada Action are kind of leveraging the popularity of the same types of political forces and feelings of dislocation, and also just resistance against change, that motivates the politics behind Donald Trump and Brexit — you’re seeing these groups using powerful, emotionally charged, populist narratives about who is coming to get you and take your good life.”

Editor’s note: The Narwhal received funding from the Corporate Mapping Project in 2019 to report on industry disclosures made in the Extractive Sectors Transparency Management Act database. That reporting included a feature on the challenges oil and gas communities face when considering a clean energy transition, an explainer on the profits made by oilsands giants even amid oil-price drops and an investigation into shortfalls in oil and gas revenue faced by rural municipalities . As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, the Corporate Mapping Project did not have any editorial influence on our reporting and, as part of our donor transparency policy, the funding was disclosed.

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To no one’s surprise, there’s been an awfully wide range of responses to what caused the catastrophic Fort McMurray wildfires.

Some blame climate change. Others peg it on the El Niño and forest management techniques. Still more suggest that now’s simply not the time to be having such a conversation.

But the one thing that appears to unite all sides is “our” alleged complicity in it as North American consumers.

For instance, the National Post’s Jen Gerson argued in a May 5 piece: “We are all responsible for climate change. Fort McMurray simply produces some of the products we all consume.”

On the same day, Elizabeth Kolbert — author of The Sixth Extinction and Field Notes from a Catastrophe — wrote in the New Yorker: “We are all consumers of oil, not to mention coal and natural gas, which means that we’ve all contributed to the latest inferno. We need to own up to our responsibility and then we need to do something about it.”

Such rhetoric is technically correct. There’s no question that if everyone on earth lived an average North American lifestyle, we’d need four planets to sustain the population.

But that’s only if we’re looking at “average” consumption rates.

As anyone who’s worked with stats before knows, averages can be very deceiving. In this case, language such as “we” or “our” can disguise a wide range of income and consumption habits that misplace levels of responsibility for climate change.

In the process, it assigns moral culpability for climate change to regular individuals rather than governments, corporations and wealthy North Americans.

“Think about the global justice movement: if you wore Nikes or blue jeans you weren’t allowed to protest neoliberalism,” says Patrick McCurdy, associate professor at University of Ottawa currently researching the evolution of oilsands advertising. “Then you look at the Occupy movement: if you owned an iPhone then you couldn’t be part of Occupy.”

“Now, it’s ‘she used oil so she can’t speak,’” he said. “It reinforces this binary of ‘who is empowered to speak?’”

Fossil Fuel Advertising Taken A Personal Turn In Recent Years

Recently, oil and gas companies and industry associations have harnessed such assumptions to attempt to make an airtight case for their continued unchecked growth.

McCurdy says the linking of the industry to lifestyle choices started in the 1960s with an Imperial Oil campaign suggesting “you have oil to thank for everything around you.”

Such rhetoric has spiked in frequency in the last few years.

McCurdy points to 2010 — the same year as the ruling on Syncrude’s responsibility for the death of 1,600 birds in its tailings pond — as the real beginning, with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers launching the Energy Citizens campaign and Canada Action gearing up for its I Love Oilsands media blitz.

McCurdy says both effectively dismiss critics by suggesting that if oil is at all implicated in one’s life and employment then one should support the industry (or at least not speak critically of it).

In 2014 Enbridge launched its Life Takes Energy campaign on TV, YouTube and most infamously in the The Walrus. Each ad sported a similar premise: everything “we” enjoy in life — baking, warm baths, Thanksgiving dinners — is linked to the oil and gas industry.

Focus On ‘Average’ Individual Behaviour Ignores Roles of Government and Business

McCurdy describes such advertising as “high-consumption, aspirational, Pinterest sort of images.”

That’s a key problem.

For, in addition to ignoring technological alternatives (public transit, geothermal heating, passive solar homes) and other ways of living life (Indigenous land-based communities or inner-city attempts at minimalism like No Impact Man), such visual rhetoric implies that oil and gas companies simply provide the goods that people demand to maintain their “average” lifestyles.

But it wasn’t “average” North Americans who knowingly spread climate misinformation, funded climate denying organizations, leased record amounts of land to oil and gas companies, invested in highways over public transit, created and maintained subsidies to fossil fuel companies and promoted the construction of pipelines and export facilities that will neutralize any emissions reductions made in other sectors.

“We live in a society in which responsibility for everything is being offloaded onto the individual,” says William Rees, professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia and originator of the “ecological footprint analysis.” “It’s this ‘there’s no such thing as society.’ That’s just not true. The real things, the real game-changers here, would be regulations imposed by government.”

Fossil Fuel Companies Have Met With Liberal Government Hundreds of Times

But the “we” rhetoric  conveniently ignores the incredible access that oil and gas companies have to government via ongoing lobbying efforts.

For instance, since the Liberals were elected in October, Suncor has met with federal officials 54 times, including three times with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Imperial Oil and Shell Canada have contributed an additional 37 and 38 meetings, respectively.

Industry organizations have also done their fair share of lobbying, including the Petroleum Services Association of Canada (52 meetings), Canadian Gas Association (45 times), the Canadian Energy Pipelines Association (44 meetings) and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (36 meetings).

‘Huge Difference’ In Emissions Levels Between Rich and Poor

Most Canadians simply don’t have that kind of pricey access to pressure governments to shape policies. Nor can many throw large amounts of money at political parties during campaigns or pay thousands for exclusive access to premiers at fundraisers.

In 2011, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives reported the ecological footprint of the top 10 per cent of income earners in Canada is close to two-and-a-half times greater than the lowest 10 per cent.

To meet the 2020 target of 25 per cent carbon emissions below 1990 levels, the richest quintile of Canadians would need to cut 51 per cent of emissions, while the lowest only 12 per cent.

In other words, while we’re all indeed consumers of fossil fuels, “owning up to our responsibility” will look very different depending on where we fall on the income spectrum.

“Even within rich countries there’s a huge difference,” Rees says.

“If you have an extra car or extra house or extra computer equipment you’re going to be far and away more consumptive than an ordinary joe.”

Rees notes that he has a friend who lives in Texas who drives an electric car and sports a complete solar array that provides all his electricity. But that friend takes one flight to Europe and “his share of that wipes out all of his savings.”

Of course, there’s a baseline consumption rate in North America, including emissions associated with military, agriculture and buildings.

This results in levels among the poorest North Americans that exceed those created by even the richest members of “emerging economies” like China and India.

But there are particular lifestyle choices available to the richest Canadians — flying around the world for vacation, owning multiple cars, living in a large suburban home and using energy-intensive electronics — that dramatically increase emissions rates.

Courtesy of the universalizing “we,” such consumers are partially let off the hook.

So while it may be simpler to write statements like “we are all responsible for climate change” than to call out a handful of powerful people and corporations who have access to policymakers via direct lobbying and campaign donations, it ignores the powerful role that governments can and probably should play in implementing regulations and price mechanisms.

If we really want to build a more equitable and sustainable society, cutting through the blithe “we’re all responsible” lingo is a must.

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.

“Our messages are not resonating,” Natural Resource Minister Greg Rickford told a room full of oil and gas executives in a luxury Rocky Mountain resort last fall. “You are fighting an uphill battle for public confidence.”

Rickford, who attended the meeting at the request of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), encouraged the executives to do more to spread the oil industry’s message to the Canadian public.

“Much of the debate over energy is characterized by myth or emotion,” he said, suggesting scientists and campaigners critical of development in the Alberta oilsands were “crowding out the real facts.”

Rickford made no mention of Canada’s international climate commitments, but he did deride concerns about pollution from the oilsands — the country’s fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions.

Rickford’s advice, released to Greenpeace via an Access to Information request, marked the beginning of a decisive shift in industry’s public relations campaigns.

As CAPP described it to The Guardian: “The energy industry is embarking on a different level of engagement and CAPP is moving to a ground campaign to activate industry supporters.”

While we’ll likely never know the level of coordination happening behind the scenes, the shared vision going forward was clearly articulated by Rickford: “Those of us here in this room have a responsibility to tell our shared energy story,” he intoned. “We must all be on the same page.”

Of Oil and Patriotism

Rickford’s call for a new “shared energy story” was in October of 2014.

At that point, the narrative that environmental advocates were “un-Canadian” had been seeded in public discourse, most doggedly by blogger Vivian Krause and most famously by key Conservative players high in the political party hierarchy.

The connection between pro-industry ideals and patriotism had been ham-handedly advanced by controversial personality Ezra Levant through his Ethical Oil campaign (which seemed to lose steam after its industry and Conservative-party connections were exposed by DeSmog).

Since then, the attempt to persuade Canadians of the Canadian-ness of the oil industry has ramped up and become much more polished.

A whole host of campaigns designed to advance the agenda of the fossil fuel industry have cropped up: Resource Works, British Columbians for Prosperity, Energy Citizens, Coal Alliance, Canadian Natural Resources Alliance, Pipeline Action, and many others.

But no individual has mastered the art quite as effectively as the oil industry’s citizen activist Cody Battershill, founder of Canada Action.

Described as a “one-man oil sands advocate…in [a] PR war,” last year Battershill told the National Post he wants to create a more “balanced conversation” about the Alberta oilsands.

But DeSmog Canada’s research indicates Battershill and Canada Action appear to have close ties to the oil industry and to powerful campaigners from the Conservative Party of Canada.

Who are Cody Battershill and Canada Action?

Battershill is a young Calgary realtor in the top one per cent of agents in his Canada-wide company. As he tells the story, his oilsands advocacy began in 2010 when he was walking along Vancouver’s Robson Street and noticed that a LUSH cosmetics store had placed some “Stop Oilsands” posters in its window. It caught his attention, he says. He knew nothing about oil and gas but “common sense says that everything in that store is made possible by natural resources.”

Battershill said he decided to get involved to foster “a more informed conversation about resource development.” He started a Twitter account and has been building Canada Action ever since.

His non-profit organization, Canada Action, sells clothing for men, women and children with the statement: “I love oil sands,” designed by Canada Action’s Robbie Piccard.

It echoes a longer-running campaign in the U.S. — run by Alex Epstein from the pro-industry Center for Industrial Progress — that makes a moral case for fossil fuels. Epstein, like Battershill, argues social prosperity relies on the consumption of fossil fuels while overlooking the overwhelming scientific evidence that shows the negative impacts of industrial pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions.

Did you know you can move somewhere where it’s #EarthHour, every hour? (Always enjoy hearing @AlexEpstein speak) pic.twitter.com/7BOSp66buP

— Cody Battershill (@codyincalgary) June 16, 2015

Battershill declined to comment on his relationship with Epstein. Epstein did not respond to an interview request.

Battershill, right on point with Rickford’s advice, has said critics of industry add “a lot of fear and emotion to the argument that’s not supported by facts.”

Alongside his prolific Twitter activity, Battershill writes articles for the Huffington Post, the Calgary Herald and the Journal of the Canadian Heavy Oil Association, where he often opposes the opinions of climate campaigners or other environmental advocates.

Canada Action also produces numerous slick infographics that promote industry views on oilsands development. These are in turn shared by Canada Action sub-groups, Oilsands Action and Pipeline Action, which play an active roll disseminating industry-friendly information to large audiences on Facebook and Twitter.

Not bad for a realtor.

So is Canada Action a one-man band as Battershill would prefer people to believe or is there more than meets the eye?

Deep Industry, Conservative Connections

Canada Action was registered as a federal not-for-profit society in September 2014. With a little help from his friends, Battershill held a launch party at the Woods Buffalo Brewing Co. in Fort McMurray the same day. (Through a corporate registry search, DeSmog Canada discovered Canada Action existed as a numbered corporation between 2012 and 2013 before being renamed Canada Action Coalition in August of 2013.)

Kim Farwell, leader of oilsands extraction at Syncrude and two-time former president of the Conservative Party of Canada’s riding association in Fort McMurray helped Battershill organize the event along with Robbie Picard, Canada Action campaigner. Another organizer, Diane Slater, announced she was retiring as chief administrative officer at the Fort McMurray Chamber of Commerce — whose ranks are loaded with heavy oil businesses — to take on a more active role in Canada Action.

Canada Action’s registration as a non-profit society reveals its board of directors. Most interestingly, Canada Action’s society documentation indicates Battershill brought in an accomplished Conservative campaigner as a director.

Matt Gelinas and the 2011 Robocall Scandal

Although he was only 26 when Canada Action was incorporated, director Matt Gelinas already had a long history of political campaigning and advocacy for conservative causes. In 2006, he supervised phone banks for the Alberta Progressive Conservative leadership campaign of the most right-wing candidate, Ted Morton.

As a University of Calgary political science student, Gelinas helped organize the visit of right-wing, incendiary speaker Ann Coulter to the university campus in 2011. In one of her more famous claims about Muslims, Coulter said, “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”

By the time he graduated, Gelinas was a seasoned political campaigner working closely with key conservative organizations.

Gelinas went on to work with the Manning Centre, an organization that promotes conservative ideas and politicians. In 2013, before the Alberta provincial election, he presented a workshop at the Manning Centre titled: “Do you know how to get your voters out?”

Gelinas is also an expert consultant on NationBuilder, which provides software for political campaigns, helping candidates organize their online presence. NationBuilder’s power lies in converting social media activity into datasets useful for elections campaigning and fundraising.

Gelinas studied under conservative political strategist, and Stephen Harper’s former chief of staff, Tom Flanagan. In his book, Winning Power: Canadian Campaigning in the Twenty-First Century, Flanagan writes that he contracted Gelinas’ company Blue Direct to perform “auto-dialler polls and electronic town halls.”

Blue Direct is still run by Gelinas’ colleague and conservative campaigner Richard Dur who was credited for helping win the 2011 federal Conservative majority. Dur is a trainee of the Koch brothers-funded Leadership Institute, a training centre for “conservative activists” that counts many senior Canadian conservative leaders among its alumni.

According to his LinkedIn account, between 2012 and 2013, Gelinas worked for the Responsive Marketing Group, an automated call service. The company has played a key role in the history of the Conservative Party of Canada and was a central player in the 2011 robocall scandal, before Gelinas joined its ranks.

Gelinas is also listed on Yatedo.com as an owner of Alberta Blue Strategies, a company that provided fundraising, voter identification services and automated calling services to the Conservatives. The Alberta Blue Strategies web address is no longer active, but according to urlmetrics.com the only available links currently redirect to the Blue Direct website.

Alberta Blue Strategies was paid more than $5,000 in 2011 from a Conservative candidate in a riding blanketed with misleading robocalls. The calls in that riding were later traced to an automated phone service provider called RackNine, which claims it provided services to a third-party who tried to “disrupt voting.” Although there is no overt connection between RackNine and Alberta Blue Strategies, Gelinas notes in a client testimonial on the company’s website that he recommends RackNine, which he uses for all his “web solutions.” DeSmog Canada could not confirm if Gelinas was connected with Alberta Blue Strategies in 2011.

Screenshot from the RackNine website hosting Matt Gelinas’ testimonial.

Furthering the connections between Gelinas’ businesses, colleagues and the Conservative Party of Canada, Riley Braun, an employee of Alberta Blue Strategies from 2011 to 2012 went on to become a stakeholder relations assistant in the office of Stephen Harper.

Canada Action’s listed address is the same as Alberta Blue Strategies. It is also the same as Patchwork Investments, owned by Susan Gelinas, the third member of Canada Action’s board of directors. There is little information about Patchwork Investments available online, but it is described on several websites as providing investment advice. Several calls to Patchwork’s listed phone number went unanswered.

Canada Action also shares an address with Data Trek Inc., an oil and gas data service provider. According to LinkedIn, the president of Data Trek is Dave Gelinas, who is a Facebook friend of Matt Gelinas, Richard Dur and Cody Battershill. DeSmog Canada tried to contact Matt Gelinas through Blue Direct to clarify his relationship to Dave Gelinas, but messages were left unanswered. A publicly available phone number for Data Trek is no longer in service.

Following the Money

As a non-profit society, Canada Action’s funders are not on the public record. Battershill says his supporters are ordinary citizens volunteering their time and effort to achieve that more “balanced conversation” about responsible resource development.

When asked who funds Canada Action by Stu McNish, producer of the Conversations That Matter video series, Battershill replied, “I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars out of my own pocket.”

“There is nothing astroturf or fake about my passion for my country,” he added. “I’ve put my money, my time and my actions where my mouth is.” McNish did not ask Battershill if he receives industry or political funds.

DeSmog Canada made several interview requests to Battershill, who declined to answer questions e-mailed to him at his request. These included questions about Canada Action’s relationship with the Conservative Party, Battershill’s relationship with Matt Gelinas and whether or not Canada Action is currently or has ever received funding from individuals or groups associated with the fossil fuel industry or the Conservative Party.

In an e-mailed statement Battershill said, “We’re strong supporters of Canada’s oilsands and the resource sector generally because we know how important these industries are to Canada’s present and future prosperity. We believe it’s critical to educate Canadians about the social and economic benefits provided by the resource sector and its commitment to world-class environmental stewardship.”

He added the organization is non-partisan.

“We accept donations from individuals and we sell Canada Action merchandise to support our campaigns,” the statement said.

Food, Shelter, Clothing and Family Vacations. This is what Canada’s resources mean to Matt from Nanaimo, #BC. pic.twitter.com/JYutrG5yws

— Canada Action (@CanadaAction) July 18, 2015

Canada Action “Oversimplifies” Oilsands Issue

Battershill says he is standing up for more balanced and inclusive conversations about Canada’s energy resources. Although to onlookers, Battershill’s shrill criticism of climate and environment advocates may be working in the wrong direction.

In addition to celebrating Canada’s strong economy and its reliance on the extractive industries, Battershill also spends ample time countering the claims of prominent environmental organizations and renewable energy advocates.

In December, Battershill attacked the credibility of the director of Clean Energy Canada, Merran Smith, calling her an “eco-activist” with a “divisive campaign to injure the oilsands in the view of the public.” He has similarly criticized climate campaigner Mike Hudema from Greenpeace, Canadian journalist and author Naomi Klein and celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio and Neil Young who have joined campaigns to advocate for the treaty rights of First Nations in the oilsands region.

Battershill has also taken up the narrative of blogger Vivian Krause who argues critics of the oilsands industry are merely paid protesters advancing the interests of U.S. companies (DeSmog has debunked Krause’s theory in an in-depth post).

According to Ken Chapman, former director of the Oil Sands Developers Group and proponent of triple-bottom line resource development, Battershill’s antics are not part of a constructive conversation.

“I think his intentions are sincere,” Chapman said of Battershill. “The problem is that I think he’s too much of a fan and I think he gets clouded. It’s difficult from Calgary to see the oilsands in perspective. I see lots of people have that problem. It’s also difficult from outside of Alberta to see the oilsands clearly,” he said.

Chapman said pro- and anti-oilsands groups take extreme positions, “like religious beliefs” that dominate the conversation, crowding out the facts.

“And it doesn’t matter what the facts are, it’s the belief systems that are what’s dominating. And quite frankly, they always will. What is open yet is the adult conversation, as opposed to the elementary school recess conversation.”

Chapman said that while Battershill’s “heart is in the right place…he is a little naïve.”

“This guy wants to win an argument. The thing is it’s not an argument. It’s about a design. We have to take a design approach to this thing, not an adversarial approach.”

Chapman added that while he thinks Canada will continue to develop fossil fuels for years to come, “we have a responsibility to do it better.”

He said that he owns an “I love oilsands” button that he wears in Fort McMurray. “I’m an owner of the oilsands. I want to be proud of it. I want to love the oilsands,” he said, adding, “I’m not there yet.”

“People are trying to oversimplify the issue. And people like Cody is well-intentioned on the industry side, but he’s oversimplifying the issue.”

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.

On the same day that Bill C51 was set for a final vote in the Senate, the Canadian internet erupted into a storm of angry tweets. The message was clear: you can take our freedom, but you can never tell our Timmies not to run ads for Enbridge.

Timmies is, of course, Tim Hortons coffee, the venerable Canadian institution whose coffee and donuts have become so inseparable from the Canadian identity that Prime Minister Stephen Harper once famously blew off going to the UN for a coffee at Timmies instead. Tim Hortons has exactly the kind of patriotic sheen to it that CAPP is hoping will rub off on its ‘Raise Your Hand’ campaign.

Last week, Enbridge pipelines announced on its blog that it would be showing its latest ads on Tim’s TV (the flatscreen televisions behind the service counter). Almost immediately, online activists seized on the opportunity.

SumOfUs, an organization that rallies public pressure to encourage companies to adopt sustainable business practices, encouraged Tim Hortons to cancel an advertising buy from Enbridge, the company trying to build public support for the Northern Gateway oilsands pipeline from Alberta to the B.C. coast. 

Within a day, more than 28,000 people had signed the SumOfUs petition encouraging Tim Hortons to dump Enbridge. Hours later, Tim Hortons did just that. And a few hours after that, this happened:

Familiar Faces urge Canadians to #BoycottTims

The most powerful voices in this call for a boycott are unsurprisingly familiar. Stephen Taylor, formerly of the National Citizen Coalition, has tweeted (not counting replies and retweets) more than 30 times today about #boycotttims. He is the de facto leader of the movement, and his message is clear:

Ezra Levant, creator of Ethical Oil, has a rich history of turning the principled stances of companies into moments for consumer uproar. In 2011, he jumped on a decision by Chiquita brands to avoid the use of ‘fuels from tar sands refineries’ after public pressure from a Forest Ethics campaign. Levant responded with a call for a consumer boycott of Chiquita bananas using the hashtag #bloodbananas and citing the company’s human rights record. He uses similar logic against Tim Hortons here:

Cody Battershill and his not-for-profit Canada Action also chimed in. Battershill, a Calgary realtor, says he got his start in pro-oil sands activism in 2010 when LUSH, a U.S.-owned company, set up displays in all of its Canadian stores showing the environmental impacts of oilsands extraction.

Thanks to their efforts, #boycotttims has been trending in Canada all afternoon. Even Conservative MPs Michelle Rempel, Jason Kenney and Pierre Poilievre have chimed in with their support. Levant has launched a petition and is crowdfunding radio ads.

Sound and Fury, Signifying … ?

#BoycottTims is not a singular online moment. Twitter is a popular place to launch or promote consumer-driven campaigns. So while all of this was happening on Canadian Twitter, other boycotts elsewhere raged on as well. These were the three most popular today:

• #boycottespn (a deplorable campaign to punish the network for awarding Caitlyn Jenner the courage award at its annual ESPY ceremony)
• #boycottorange (a consumer response to a French telecom giant threatening to cut ties with Israel over their illegal occupation of Palestinian territory)
• #boycottbrew (encouraging UK cafe-goers to avoid a chain owned by a guy who attacked a cyclist)

So, let’s recap. Elsewhere in the world, people are using Twitter to fight for (or against) transgender rights, ending illegal occupations in Palestine and for basic human decency.

And in Canada, we’re filling up timelines because one company changed its mind about running ads for another company inside its establishments.

If you find that hard to swallow, you’re not the only one.

When we roll back the rim on this moment in time, there’s isn’t likely to be a prize for anyone (well, except maybe for SumOfUs).

Tim Hortons isn’t legally required to run anyone’s ads on their closed circuit networks. Enbridge will find other places to spend its advertising budget. And there are dozens of coffee shops, gas stations and cafes eager to take the money of the 100,000 oil sands workers who reportedly consume Tim Hortons brew every day.

It’ll be at least a month or more until Tim Hortons — sorry, Restaurant Brands International — releases its Q2 financials and we find out if today’s hashtag wars made any difference to the bottom line.

In the meantime, it’s #hugyourcatday.

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.