The Alberta Energy Regulator has indefinitely suspended at least 19 environmental monitoring requirements for major oilsands producers, including Syncrude, Suncor, Imperial Oil and CNRL.

The decisions come one month after the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) sent a long letter to the federal government outlining requests that environmental and pollution monitoring requirements be put on hold, requirements it described as “low-risk regulatory obligations.”

Now the regulator has issued a series of decisions that include the suspension of some environmental monitoring in the oilsands.

“It’s quite shocking and it is quite concerning,” Mandy Olsgard, a risk assessment specialist and former senior environmental toxicologist with the Alberta Energy Regulator, told The Narwhal.

For some monitoring, “losing this data for a very short amount of time might not affect the overall datasets,” she said. “But some of these clauses are there to understand potential acute risks to health or the environment.”

For Olsgard and others, the regulator’s decisions read like a “wish list” from CAPP.

In an email, regulator spokesperson Shawn Roth said “[the regulator] is in regular contact with industry, including industry groups such as, CAPP and [the Explorers and Producers Association of Canada], as we work together to navigate through the current situation.”

“Looks like CAPP got its way,” Shaun Fluker, an associate professor of law at the University of Calgary, told The Narwhal. 

The regulator has granted suspensions to multiple major oilsands projects for requirements ranging from volatile organic compound monitoring to fugitive emissions leak detection to wetlands and wildlife monitoring to bird monitoring at tailings ponds.

Just days before bird monitoring programs were suspended, Imperial Oil found dozens of dead grebes and shorebirds in their tailings ponds, according to CBC. While the regulator has required that scare cannons and other deterrents remain in place, an Imperial spokesperson said these were not effective in preventing birds from landing at the company’s tailings ponds.

Bird monitoring in the oilsands gained international attention when more than 1,600 ducks were found dead after landing on a Syncrude tailings pond in 2008. More recently, Syncrude was fined more than $2.7 million last year after 31 great blue herons died in their tailings ponds in 2015. Those herons were initially discovered by a contractor working on a bird monitoring program for Syncrude. 

As Olsgard notes, these current suspensions come during an important bird migration season.

The suspension of these requirements is effective immediately, which leaves some experts questioning how sites will be monitored. 

“You don’t know what’s going on in groundwater or surface water or fugitive emissions,” Barry Robinson, a Calgary-based lawyer with Ecojustice, told The Narwhal.

“It really is stepping out into no man’s land by suspending the actual monitoring,” he added.

“You just won’t know what’s happening.”

Olsgard is concerned that while temporarily stopping some monitoring may not pose a huge issue in the long run, other data is critically important to assessing risk to public health and the environment. 

But companies like Syncrude and Suncor emphasized to The Narwhal that these suspensions were necessary for the protection of public health during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. 

“We understand and know the public expects us to responsibly develop the oilsands, which includes monitoring for potential impacts, but we also want people to recognize that we’re relying on the guidance of Alberta Health Services,” Will Gibson, spokesperson for Syncrude, said.

The Narwhal previously reported the Alberta government had suspended the requirement to report on some environmental monitoring as a result of COVID-19. 

The latest decisions by the regulator put some monitoring itself on hold as well.

Roth said by email that companies must continue to collect the “majority of monitoring information” and make it available upon request.

But with the latest suspensions, experts are concerned some information will never be collected.

“There’s nothing to report if you don’t monitor,” Fluker said.

8 environmental responsibilities Alberta’s oil and gas companies can skip because of coronavirus

‘Unilateral’ decisions

Each decision is labelled as a “unilateral amendment to approval conditions regarding monitoring in response to COVID-19” and was posted on the regulator’s website. “We anticipate that the amendments will be in place as long as the public orders issued under the Public Health Act remain in effect,” Roth said in an email.

For some operations, such as Imperial Oil’s Kearl mine and Cold Lake in-situ project, the list of types of environmental monitoring programs suspended contains 19 items. (Imperial’s Kearl work camp is itself the site of a COVID-19 outbreak.)

According to the decisions issued by the regulator, the companies have “raised legitimate concerns about their ability to meet monitoring requirements” during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

“We made a request to the Alberta Energy Regulator, along with other oilsands operators to suspend certain monitoring activities,” Gibson, the spokesperson for Syncrude, told The Narwhal.

“We made this request because the safety and wellbeing of our employees is a top priority,” he said. “We’re following, and expecting our employees to follow, recommended and mandated government measures.” Gibson said the company wants to “make sure physical distancing is maintained” whether on buses, on site or in work camps.

Erin Rees, a representative for Suncor, reiterated Gibson’s explanations. “Since mid-March Suncor has been focused on doing our part to flatten the curve of COVID-19. Reducing interactions between people on our sites and in our offices is critical in ensuring the health and safety of our workforce and we’ve limited people on site and in offices to essential staff only since the middle of March,” she said in an email.

“We made requests to the [regulator] to postpone some monitoring in order to protect workers and the public from COVID-19 and specifically to ensure public health guidance is respected.”

“To be clear — all requests for postponement of monitoring were due to the number of people required to perform the work, impacting our ability to ensure physical distancing.”

Gibson said Syncrude has dramatically reduced its workforce in other areas as well, noting staffing at its Aurora and Mildred Lake operations have been reduced by more than 1,000 workers.

Some “monitoring activities posed a challenge in terms of maintaining physical distancing,” he added. The company has also reduced its operations maintenance staff.

Olsgard, the toxicologist, noted that with decreased staff on site to run oilsands operations, the risk to public health and the environment may actually be increased. “We’re actually in kind of a high-risk operational state,” she said.

David Spink, a retired Government of Alberta employee and former director of air and water approvals, told The Narwhal by email that he questioned the assertion that monitoring work can’t be done safely. 

“I find it somewhat hard to accept that we can have construction workers doing work on an expansion to our condo building but the oilsands industry can’t have contractors come in and do some of the monitoring that is required,” he said. 

“Having done and seen some of this monitoring it can be done very safely in the context of social distancing and minimal interactions,” he added, noting that companies should be asked to provide much more specific detail about why each monitoring requirement can’t be met, or how the missed data could be mitigated.

Imperial Oil and CNRL did not respond to The Narwhal’s request for comment by publication time. 

Concerns about work camps

Currently, Alberta’s public health rules restrict gatherings of more than 15 people, encourage physical distancing of two metres and restrict business activities to those considered to be essential services.

Essential services are still allowed to operate in the province, and the government has issued a long list to clarify what is considered essential. 

“Petroleum, natural gas and coal” jobs are considered to be essential services in Alberta, as are “environmental services for agriculture, mining, oil and gas.”

Gibson, the spokesperson for Syncrude, emphasized the company was concerned about bringing in contractors from outside the region to complete environmental monitoring.

“Some of the monitoring activities involve bringing in people from outside the province,” he said, adding that he was “not sure if we have that capability right now” to have monitoring be completed in house.

“We understand and respect the need for monitoring,” he added. “We’re not asking for these activities to be altered or taken away.”

For people in the field like Charlotte Clarke, a consultant who works in the oil and gas industry, there are serious concerns about worker safety during the pandemic.

“Whenever we delay inspections, it always is concerning for me,” she told The Narwhal. “But when it came to the choice between that and my safety, it’s a hard one.” 

For Clarke, an engineer who works with in-situ operations in the oilsands, staying in work camps is the real concern, more so than the daily work itself.

“You wouldn’t be able to maintain social distancing,” she says of the mess hall at camp. “It’s pretty much like a school cafeteria.”

“I’m just really glad that I didn’t have to go through that.”

What work is safe during a pandemic?

Minister of Environment and Parks Jason Nixon has previously said that it was his government’s goal to “keep people working … in the oil and gas industry where safe and within the requirements the chief medical officer has set out.” 

“We believe we can do that on lots of projects,” he added. He was referring to the cleanup of inactive and orphan oil and gas wells.

That leaves Robinson wondering why environmental monitoring in the oilsands can’t be done safely as well.

“If the operation is running, the monitoring should be running,” Robinson said.

Olsgard agrees. “They could have developed COVID-specific protocols to address worker safety,” she said. 

Fluker points to other activities deemed essential and the hazards facing workers. “The province is OK with letting Cargill operate,” he said, pointing to the largest single outbreak of COVID-19 in Canada, in a meat-packing facility in High River, Alta. 

Meanwhile, bird monitoring is suspended in tailings ponds at Alberta’s oilsands.

“There’s a real divergence there and it’s hard to reconcile.”

‘No end date, no public notice, no discussion at all’

Olsgard is concerned with how broad the regulator’s recent decisions appear to be. More detailed requirements, she said, “might be there in the background, but I don’t see it from this decision.”

Fluker points to the lack of public consultation and notice as concerning aspects of the regulator’s most recent decisions. 

“If we’re going to relax or waive [requirements], at a bare minimum we have to at least give public notice,” he said. “In this case, the regulator has decided to even do away with that.”

These decisions, he said, amount to “unilateral amendments to a list of monitoring requirements which are easily associated with some pretty significant public interest concerns.”

“And they’re suspended for the foreseeable future with no end date, no public notice, no discussion at all.”

Without public consultation, he said, there’s no chance for input as to “whether or not the essential/non-essential line is being drawn in the right place.”

For Spink, the regulator’s decisions reflect its priorities. “To my mind it is another blank check to industry and reflects a real lack of priority on/for the environment,” he said in an email.

‘You really don’t know’

In April, The Narwhal reported on a series of ministerial orders stemming from Alberta Energy and Alberta Environment and Parks that effectively suspended much of companies’ routine environmental reporting.

For Olsgard, the suspension of monitoring is far more concerning than what previous ministerial orders had laid out with regards to reporting. “As long as they were still collecting the monitoring data, they had a repository that could be requested by the regulator or stakeholders,” she said.

“Then we had those assurances that we would understand what had happened in the environment during this time. But now that we’ve relaxed monitoring, you really don’t know.”

Fluker agrees. “This is clearly, I think, much more problematic from an environmental regulation perspective,” he told The Narwhal.

“Monitoring is often how problems are obviously initially detected.”

“Some of this certainly looks like it’s more of a cost-saving measure than it is a health measure,” he added.

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.

As communities across the country braced for the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Canada’s oil and gas lobby was pushing the federal government to suspend pollution monitoring requirements and delay forthcoming measures to fight climate change in an effort to prop up the flagging industry.

In a 13-page letter to cabinet ministers late last month, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) asked the government to “adopt a do no harm principle with respect to regulations and the costs they impose on industry.”

But some observers say the proposed measures could in fact cause serious harm to Indigenous communities, the environment and public health.

“I was gobsmacked,” said Dale Marshall, the national climate program manager with Environmental Defence, which posted a leaked copy of the letter online last week. It has since been posted on CAPP’s website. 

While Marshall said some of the requests, such as a recommendation to defer greenhouse gas emissions reporting by a few months, are more reasonable given the challenges posed by the pandemic, he said others are “quite frankly, ludicrous.”

Among more than 30 recommendations, CAPP asked the federal government to suspend methane leak detection surveys for the duration of the COVID-19 crisis, defer monitoring required under the Fisheries Act for 2020 and suspend stack testing until non-essential workers return to work sites. 

The association also requested the federal government defer legislation on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), hold off on changes to the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, defer increases to the carbon tax until the recovery is underway, postpone additional climate measures, defer implementation of the clean fuel standard for three years, and exclude offshore exploration drilling and in-situ oil sands projects from federal environmental assessments.

A number of these requests “have little to do with the COVID crisis, aren’t imminent and are really offensive,” said Marshall.

Some could pose a health risk. 

“When they ask for a suspension of monitoring pollution that’s coming from smokestacks or a suspension of leak detection for methane, those are public health issues,” he said.

In a statement, CAPP said oil and gas companies have postponed non-essential work to limit the number of people at work sites and ensure social distancing to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and protect their workers.

“With fewer people on-site, it has been a challenge to meet all of the existing regulatory requirements in order to be compliant,” the association said. “Implementing temporary changes for certain low-risk regulatory requirements allows companies to focus on critical areas of operations and continue to ensure effective protection of the environment and our neighbours.”

CAPP added that it’s asking the government to “suspend, delay or reconsider” regulations or policies that could increase costs to industry.

For the oil industry, which has struggled under depressed prices for the last few years, 2020 brought another major hit. Oil prices plunged to record lows, at one point dropping below $0, driven by a decline in demand due to the COVID-19 pandemic and a price war that led to a glut in supply.

“Increasing the costs of operating will inflict further damage to our economy as we struggle to weather this crisis,” CAPP’s statement said. “Support for the industry now can position us to be a part of the foundation of recovery and the long-term rebuild of Canada’s social and economic structure.”

Why we’re seeing negative oil prices in Alberta and across North America

Observers expressed major concerns, however, that the industry association’s approach to economic recovery runs contrary to Canada’s commitments on climate change and Indigenous rights. 

Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, director of the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre at the University of British Columbia, said the organization’s letter was “very disturbing.”

In particular, CAPP’s recommendation that the federal government delay legislation on UNDRIP is both “unwise” and “very aggressive,” she said.

CAPP said there needs to be a full understanding of how UNDRIP fits with Canada’s economic recovery “to ensure alignment with the do no harm principle” and asked the federal government to hold off on legislation until “meaningful consultation” is possible.

But Turpel-Lafond said “it’s not going to be possible to rebuild the economy if it means that you do not respect that Indigenous people on their territory have significant rights that need to be appropriately respected.” 

“We need to make significant progress on supporting First Nations governments, addressing land issues, making some fundamental shifts in Canadian society to make it a more fair and just society, and to say that that’s a project that we can’t do because of a pandemic is really a concern.”

Dayna Scott, an environmental law professor at York University, noted the irony in CAPP urging the federal government “to adopt this do no harm principle.”

“Certainly, I think Indigenous people experience harm when projects are approved over their objections and without their consent,” she said.

The industry association is using the COVID-19 crisis as cover to push forward longstanding demands, Scott added.

“The most blatant example is they took a shot at getting the offshore exploration drilling and the in-situ oilsands (projects) taken out of the environmental assessment regime and they don’t even offer a COVID-related rational,” she said. 

CAPP argues in-situ projects, which involve injecting steam through horizontal wells to pump oil to the surface, are already subject to provincial legislation and makes the case that offshore exploratory drilling is “routine” and the risks and mitigations are well known.

“I don’t think people want to see oil companies using the excuse of the pandemic to be able to have projects approved without public input,” Scott said.

“If anything, I think people have come to see this period of shut down as an opportunity for us to pause and think carefully about what kinds of activities we want to continue once it’s finished,” she said.

People don’t want to see a return to “a ramped-up version of an oil-based economy” coming out of the COVID-19 crisis, Scott added.

On the same day the federal government announced $1.7 billion to help clean up oil and gas wells and create thousands of jobs, Global News asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about CAPP’s letter.

In response, he said “just because we are in one crisis right now doesn’t mean we can forget about the other crisis, the climate crisis that we are also facing as a world, as a country.”

The federal government remains committed to exceeding its 2030 emissions targets and reaching net zero by 2050, added Moira Kelly, a spokesperson for Environment and Climate Change Minister Jonathan Wilkinson, in a statement to The Narwhal. 

11 things you need to know as Trudeau announces $1.7 billion to clean up ‘festering’ orphan and inactive wells

While Scott said Trudeau’s comments offer some comfort that the government won’t compromise on its high-profile commitments, such as the carbon tax, she worries about concessions on some of the more complex, lower-profile issues CAPP raised.

It’s a concern Marshall shares. “We’re going to have to keep an eye on a lot of these,” he said.

As it stands, Canada is projected to miss its 2030 target by 77 million tonnes — roughly the emissions produced by 16.6 million cars in a year ­— without new measures to reduce greenhouse gases. 

“The (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has made it crystal clear major GHG reductions are needed before this decade concludes or the world will find it exceedingly difficult, if not impossible to keep warming to 1.5 C,” said Jeffrey Brook, the scientific director of the Canadian Urban Environmental Health Research Consortium, in an email to The Narwhal.

He noted Canadians are already experiencing the consequences of climate change at the current level of warming. 

“It seems a shame that CAPP would thus try to gain three years of time in meeting critical clean fuel objectives and also weigh in on national carbon pricing plans,” said Brook, who is the lead author of a paper published last year that found some oilsands air emissions are underestimated. 

“This is three years we don’t have.”

‘Nowhere else to turn’: First Nations inundated by oilsands projects face impossible choices

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The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), the self-described voice of the oil and gas industry, has laid out its vision for a “streamlined” public-involvement process in extensive lobbying records obtained by The Narwhal in a freedom of information request.

The lobbying records — obtained after readers of The Narwhal bellied up $643.95 to access them — span more than a year, and show CAPP’s input into key decisions made by the Alberta Energy Regulator.

The documents reveal that CAPP’s vision is one that would “expedite” aspects of public consultation — potentially reducing the opportunities for Albertans to voice objections to energy projects that affect them — and reduce the scope of projects that companies need to seek public input on.

Landowners and affected Albertans receive notice of new oil and gas developments that may directly and adversely affect them — whether it’s an oil or gas well, a pipeline, an oilsands development or another energy project. They can then file what’s known as a statement of concern if they are worried that the project will affect them or the local environment.

The lobbying records make it clear that industry is seeking to speed up or eliminate that process for some projects.

In one document, CAPP and other industry representatives denounced the statement of concern process as the “Achilles heel” of energy project approvals.

In another, CAPP laments that, when it comes to brownfield oilsands projects, “several [regulator] procedures that involve giving notice to the public regarding industry activities are leading to delays, as well as criticism of the industry.” (“Brownfield” refers to land where other industrial activities have previously taken place.)

And so CAPP is lobbying the regulator to “streamline” the process and reduce or eliminate the opportunity for the public to be involved in some cases — that could include shortening the 30-day period that stakeholders can file a statement of concern for some types of projects, or increasing the regulator’s use of discretion in posting public notice at all.

“A [statement of concern] is one of the only ways Albertans can try and have their concerns recognized,” Nikki Way, a senior analyst with the Pembina Institute who reviewed some of the documents, wrote in an email to The Narwhal.

“It is part of the ‘deal’ with oil and gas development in this province — that [Albertans] can have a say … Frankly, their ability for input and influence is already fairly limited to this process.”

Proposed changes ‘very concerning’

Advocates worry that public consultation and transparency are increasingly being pushed down the list of priorities for the province’s energy regulator, at the request of industry lobby groups.

“It’s what CAPP does,” Barry Robinson, a lawyer with Ecojustice’s Calgary office who reviewed some of the documents, told The Narwhal. “It lobbies the Alberta Energy Regulator and it lobbies the Government of Alberta to try to weaken regulations.”

Some of CAPP’s recommendations, he noted, have the potential to “essentially eliminate the ability for people to file statements of concern” for some types of projects.

“It’s very concerning.”

CAPP declined to answer specific questions from The Narwhal but did provide an emailed comment from Ben Brunnen, CAPP’s vice president of oilsands operations and fiscal policy.

“The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers is advocating for a process that is clear, consistent and makes it easier for stakeholders that are directly impacted by projects to be involved in the [regulator’s] decision-making process,” Brunnen wrote.

“At the same time, making the [statement of concern] process more efficient and transparent will help increase regulatory certainty for industry,” Brunnen added.

“That will make it easier for companies to plan out projects and make investment decisions which, in turn, will help make Alberta a better place for industry to invest.”

But legal experts told The Narwhal they worry this increased efficiency may erode the regulator’s public-involvement efforts and further narrow an already-narrow process.

The Alberta Energy Regulator — a corporation funded by industry that is in charge of regulating the province’s energy industry — declined to answer specific questions and instead provided a statement by email, noting, in part, that “making Alberta’s regulatory system more efficient has been a priority since our inception in 2013.”

“As Alberta’s energy regulator, we have a responsibility to help create a more competitive province by ensuring that our system is modern and efficient, without compromising public safety and the environment,” wrote Jordan Fitzgerald, a spokesperson for the regulator.

“To this end, we are working on a number of initiatives, which includes clarifying our statement of concern process and application timelines to create greater transparency and certainty.”

No public notice if ‘in the regulator’s opinion’ there are minimal effects

CAPP has extensive access to Alberta Energy Regulator officials, with lobbying records showing frequent breakfast meetings, regulator-led workshops, meetings to share “informal updates,” emails, phone calls and coffee dates at Second Cup.

CAPP senior employees are also mainstays in a wide variety of stakeholder committees, like the regulator’s industry advisory committee and regulatory efficiency council — neither of which is listed on the regulator’s website.

Through its lobbying efforts, CAPP has been able to clearly outline its vision for the future of public involvement in energy project approvals.

In a November 2018 letter sent to the regulator, CAPP’s VP of oilsands, Ben Brunnen, laid out the association’s “key priorities with respect to streamlining”  the statement of concern process.

In the letter, Brunnen laid out numerous suggestions — pointing to regulations — including that the regulator should not need to let a public-notice period related to energy project proposals elapse before making a decision if, “in the regulator’s opinion has minimal or no adverse effect on the environment.”

CAPP, Robinson said, “is saying [to the regulator] ‘oh, you have this discretion so use it even more so’.”

Experts say this would appear to mean that if the regulator deems a project to be low-risk, a landowner or concerned member of the public would not necessarily be notified the application was taking place — and the regulator could make decisions before letting a public notice period elapse.

Brunnen also asked the regulator for a list of projects for which this exemption would apply.

“To further enable this process for [statement of concern] streamlining, industry would advocate that the [regulator] develop a list of project applications for which this exemption can be reasonably applied,” he wrote.

It is not clear from the lobbying records which types of projects CAPP expects this exemption to apply to, but The Narwhal has previously reported that the regulator deems 95 per cent of applications for oil and gas wells to be “low risk.”

The regulator plans to automate the vast majority of well approvals this year, resulting in processing times of as little as 15 minutes. Fitzgerald, the regulator spokesperson, told The Narwhal by email that, “changes to our application processing times do not affect the public involvement process.”

But others are concerned that industry and the regulator are increasingly willing to move ahead with projects that are not deemed to be high risk.

“CAPP is advocating for narrowly defining who can be involved and removing this process altogether for projects they assert are ‘routine,’” according to Way of the Pembina Institute.

“But ‘routine’ doesn’t mean that there is no risk. … Routine means there is a standard amount of risk compared to the thousands of applications the [regulator] is processing.”

‘CAPP is trying to push’ regulator to reject hearings

Robinson with Ecojustice points out that the public consultation process has already undergone substantial changes since the Alberta Energy Regulator started overseeing the industry in 2013.

“Prior to 2013, when the [Alberta Energy Regulator] was formed out of the [government’s Energy Resources Conservation Board], if the party was found to be directly and adversely affected, then there had to be a hearing,” Robinson said.

“They changed that,” he said. “Now holding a hearing is entirely up to the discretion of the Alberta Energy Regulator.”

Nigel Bankes, a law professor at the University of Calgary who specializes in natural resource law, told The Narwhal by email that many statements of concern are already rejected by the regulator.

Bankes last analyzed the results of statements of concern filed between 2015 and 2017. His recollection, he said, was “the success rate for qualifying statements of concern with the [Alberta Energy Regulator] was very low.”

“I would be surprised if that success rate has significantly improved.”

Fraser Thomson, also a lawyer and a colleague of Robinson’s at Ecojustice, says that gathering all the necessary information prior to making a decision on a proposed energy project — particularly if that approval is automated — is essential. That includes, he says, asking landowners and residents if they have any legitimate concerns about how a project could impact them — and listening to their concerns.

“You try to get all the info up front and make the best decision,” he told The Narwhal.

“Yes, it’s going to be a longer process,” he said,“but it’s going to be a better process.”

Way echoes that sentiment. “The people that are on the ground, with homes near these wells and facilities, are the people who might know a thing or two about impacts from these developments.”

Thomson is concerned the public may be increasingly cut out of the process.

“The [regulator] already has a lot of discretion in accepting statements of concern and holding hearings,” Thomson said.

“Obviously CAPP is trying to push them to use that certain discretion in a certain way to try to reject more statements of concern and hold even fewer hearings.”

Expediting public notice process

Fitzgerald, the regulator spokesperson, pointed out that there are many, many projects on the go in the province. “Every year, we receive about 40,000 applications — from accessing a parcel of land to drilling a well or building a pipeline,” he wrote.

“Regardless of the project, we share applications with Albertans on our public notice of application page and encourage public involvement in our decision making. Applications are typically available for review on this page for 30 days.”

But in lobbying records, it appears that the regulator conceded to CAPP that not all projects necessitate such a posting  — particularly when it comes to brownfield oilsands developments.

“Having to provide public notice for everything is potentially unnecessary and slows down project expansions/changes,” the Alberta Energy Regulator wrote in a document in collaboration with CAPP that sought to outline opportunities for “streamlining regulatory processes.”

The document also listed a number of “CAPP suggestion[s],” including that the Alberta Energy Regulator “should consider decreasing the amount of time for public notices to stay on website … There may be opportunities to go from 30 day notice to shorter, expedited route.”

“Frankly, which landowners check the Alberta Energy Regulator website very often?” asked Daryl Bennett, a director with Action Surface Rights, a landowner group in southern Alberta.

Bennett noted that, while he does agree with some of CAPP’s suggestions to address what he said could be potentially “vexatious” concerns about brownfield developments, he is very concerned that CAPP is seeking to reduce the ability of landowners to file statements of concern.

“A statement of concern may be the only avenue for landowner concerns to be addressed,” he said.

“Industry has deep pockets, access to lawyers and experts and are a well-run machine in handling objections,” he added.

“They want to ramrod their projects through.”

‘David and Goliath’

Donald Wieben, who has farmed near Fairview, Alta, for more than four decades, has recently been through the statement-of-concern process over a new pipeline right-of-way proposed to cross his farmland. He and his wife, Marg, filed the paperwork in time, but he told The Narwhal the window of opportunity for busy farmers and landowners is narrow.

“It would be awfully easy for a landowner to miss the timing for it,” Wieben said of the 30 days landowners have to file a statement of concern.

“Yes, they send you a slip in the mail, but it looks like junk mail,” he added. “It would have been easy to have missed it.”

The whole process of filing a statement of concern and getting to a hearing, Wieben said, can be “a bit like David and Goliath.”

“We couldn’t hire better lawyers than the company could afford,” Wieben said, noting that he and his wife have spent countless hours essentially “volunteering” their time in an effort to do what they feel is right.

Landowner sign-off on cleanup plans in question

Other recommendations give further clues as to the direction CAPP is lobbying the regulator to head in when it comes to involving the public in decision making.

In the documents obtained by The Narwhal, CAPP also lobbied the regulator on what are known as remediation action plans — plans developed to coordinate the cleanup of a contaminated area.

CAPP notes that “policy … requires consultation with affected person in developing a [Remediation Action Plan] … However the regulations requires ‘reporting’ not consultation.”

In essence, CAPP is arguing that policies are more stringent than provincial regulations require.

The association goes on to lobby that the policy be changed, so that industry should no longer be required to get the signatures of affected people — like landowners or farmers — to confirm that “their concerns and interest are accurately characterized” or to get signed “letters of no objection.”

In the documents, CAPP recommends “amending to soften the ‘must’ requirement to ‘should’ or ‘best efforts’.”

In other words, companies would no longer be required to have landowners sign off on their cleanup efforts, but would rather be encouraged to gain landowners’ approval on a voluntary basis.

“That would place the onus on landowners to prove that it’s not good enough,” Bennett said.

Public involvement ‘very important in the future’

The Alberta Energy Regulator does not necessarily implement all policies proposed by CAPP, but the two share a goal of increasing “efficiency” in public consultation, as well as speeding up the process where possible.

“All [statements of concern] are following our new process with a goal to move applications as quickly as possible,” wrote Bolo Talabi, VP of authorizations at the Alberta Energy Regulator in response to a letter from CAPP.

And though the regulator may not adopt all of CAPP’s suggestions, it’s clear the association’s lobbying efforts won’t be slowing down any time soon.

At a December meeting of the regulatory efficiency council — at which numerous CAPP, regulator and industry employees were present —  the group reviewed its work in 2018 and set plans for the future. In 2019, the minutes noted, the group would “keep the momentum going.”

As the council put it, “public involvement and related issues are going to be very important in the future.”

Way notes that there has been much talk in Alberta about cutting red tape and speeding up the approval process as of late.

“There is this perception that these projects are being held up for years. In most cases, that is not at all the case,” she said.

And, she said, there are repercussions for everyone if regulator processes are gutted.

“If the [regulator] and government were to follow CAPP’s recommendations in the name of shorter approval times, it would be at the expense of everyday Albertans.”

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Ontario’s electoral watchdog has been asked to probe whether Canada’s largest oil and gas lobby group broke the law during the recent election campaign.

Two organizations recently filed a formal request for Ontario’s Chief Electoral Officer to launch an investigation into an election advertising blitz by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), Canada’s largest oil and gas lobby group.

The ad campaign targeted voters in 13 Ontario “Liberal swing ridings,” according to a flyer distributed by CAPP officials at a government-sponsored summit in Vaughan, near Toronto. The campaign ended a few days before the June 7, 2018 election that brought Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives to power.

Greenpeace Canada and Democracy Watch have laid out details of CAPP’s campaign in Ontario, which included billboards in “high visibility locations” in the Toronto area and 400,000 pieces of pro-pipeline literature sent to households via Canada Post.

The campaign, which ran between April 8 and May 29, was uncovered in June by an ongoing National Observer / Toronto Star / Global News investigation.

Ontario’s Election Finances Act requires registration as a third-party advertiser if an individual or entity that is not a candidate or political party spends $500 or more on ads that address issues raised by parties or candidates.

The political spending has to occur during the six months before the election campaign period, which would be Nov. 9, 2017 to May 9, 2018, or during the election campaign period, which was May 9 to June 7.

In their submission to Elections Ontario, the two organizations called CAPP’s ground campaign an attempt “clearly aimed at affecting voters support for 8 political parties” that was “unprecedented.”

According to Elections Ontario’s policies, the next step is for Chief Electoral Officer Greg Essensa to acknowledge receipt to the person or body in question, if he decides to investigate.

Ontario PC, oilpatch campaign too similar, say groups

The ads in question did not identify CAPP as the main funder. They were fronted by a group called Canada’s Energy Citizens, which was created and managed by CAPP to drive public support for oilpatch-friendly policies in Canada.

Neither CAPP nor Canada’s Energy Citizens were registered as third-party advertisers for the recent election campaign.

The advertising material urges Canadians to “tell your federal MP to support the Trans Mountain Pipeline” alongside the message, “Is Canada closed for business?”

The messaging, according to the complaint, touched on provincial election issues, such as carbon pricing and whether environmental regulations are affecting business in Ontario.

Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative party campaigned against carbon pricing throughout the election, and is in the process of repealing the province’s cap and trade system.

An example of the messaging in the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producer’s campaign in Ontario in April and May 2018. Image courtesy of CAPP

Parallel to the time CAPP’s “closed for business” billboards were displayed in the Toronto region and on social media, Ford was campaigning that he would be “going down to the border and putting up a big neon sign saying ‘Ontario is open for business.’ ”

“I’m concerned that we’re seeing an increasingly desperate oil industry importing into Canada the front groups and big-money politics that have been deployed so effectively in the United States to delay action on climate change,” said Keith Stewart, a senior strategist with Greenpeace Canada who is one of the complainants.

“Gutting Ontario’s climate plan might prop up their profits for a few more years, but at what cost?”

CAPP spokeswoman Chelsie Klassen said they had not heard of the official request for investigation. “We haven’t been notified of any requests and will not speculate,” she wrote in an e-mail, declining further comment.

Previously, Klassen told National Observer CAPP’s campaign “aligned with the federal decision on a federally-regulated pipeline deemed in the national interest, targeting federal Members of Parliament, not candidates of the Ontario election.”

The period in which the ad campaign ran, April 8 to May 29, was the same period in which the federal government was deciding on the fate of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project.

But Stewart argues CAPP’s campaign only took place in Ontario Liberal swing ridings.

In the Elections Ontario complaint, Stewart cites social media posted from Canada’s Energy Citizens urging the public to contact both federal and provincial representatives about concerns pertaining to energy issues and Canada’s business operations.

For example, an April 30 tweet on ‘competitiveness’ from Energy Citizens issued a call to action for individuals to contact “all levels of government” to address “competitiveness.”

Some of the tweets used the #onpoli hashtag, Stewart said, were therefore targeting people interested in Ontario politics.

“It is also worth noting that there were five twitter postings from Energy Citizens attacking carbon pricing on June 5 and 6, immediately prior to the Ontario election,” he added in this submission.

Chelsie Klassen, Media Relations Manager for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers introduces president and CEO Tim McMillan at a press conference in the Charles Lynch Press Theatre in the Parliament of Canada in Ottawa to talk about its economic report for A Global Vision for Canadian Oil and Natural Gas, on Monday, February 26th, 2018. Photo: Alex Tétreault / National Observer

Elections Ontario ‘must strongly enforce the law’

Both groups believe CAPP’s lobbying efforts meet the definition of “political advertising” stated by Elections Ontario. The groups also believe the oilpatch exceeded the allotted spending amount for such a campaign.

According to Ontario’s Election Finances Act, each ad is required to identify both who is running the ad, and who paid for it. Ad spending cannot exceed $600,000 overall (or $24,000 in any riding) during the pre-campaign period or $100,000 overall (or $4,000 per riding) during the campaign period.

“The disclosure requirements and spending limits are there to prevent big businesses and other wealthy interests from undermining fair and democratic elections,” said Duff Conacher, Co-founder of the Ottawa-based Democracy Watch.

“Elections Ontario must strongly enforce the law and not create any technical loopholes that can be exploited by these wealthy interests.”

Both Conacher and Stewart note that CAPP’s efforts to directly target “13 Liberal swing ridings” indicates “a strategy that includes both partisan considerations and an interest in affecting electoral outcomes.”

Previously, electoral experts told National Observer Ontario and the federal government have identical ridings (outside of four ridings in the far north, where two federal electoral districts have been divided into four provincial electoral districts), and voters commonly confuse federal and provincial jurisdiction.

“As a result, it is clear that the campaign was not within the normal parameters of promotion of a program or activity — it was clearly an explicitly political advertising campaign,” write Conacher and Stewart in their joint request for investigation.

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When the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) released its 2018 oil outlook, which predicts major production growth to 2035, there was one major detail no one seemed to notice.

The projections assume a world where future emissions don’t stay within the climate limits set in the goals of the Paris Agreement. Not by a long shot.*

CAPP based its projections on a survey of Canadian oil producers in the first quarter of 2018.**

The Globe and Mail, CBC, and Canadian Press (published in Global and the National Post) covered the report, but not a single one of them took even a sentence or two to remind readers that CAPP’s projections assume a future reality of a fried planet.

“CAPP definitely got their message out across Canada, without much critical analysis,” University of Regina journalism professor Patricia Elliott told The Narwhal.

She added Chris Varcoe of the Calgary Herald provided a few analytical comments about the need to diversify the industry, “but he was talking about diversified oil markets, not diversified energy sources.”

“From my experience,” Elliott said, “it’s not that reporters don’t want to cover the industry more closely. The stories are tough and require a lot of extra research to get it right — you don’t want to make a mistake with a high-stakes issue.”

Poor staffing of newsrooms makes it especially difficult to do this kind of reporting, she said.

“If I was an editor, I would assign a climate beat, like The Guardian has done, and have business reporters take workshops on covering climate change as a business story, including industry accountability. The economic implications of earth’s changing climate are major, and there’s just not enough reporting work that holds power to account when disasters strike.”

So just what did CAPP announce?

CAPP said it expects to see a jump from the 4.2 million barrels per day of oil produced today in Canada to 5.6 million by 2035 — an increase of 33 per cent.

The bulk of the growth CAPP forecasts would come from expanded oilsands extraction, which the industry group expects to increase 60 per cent by 2035.

The expanded production relies on three pipelines being built to move more bitumen: TransCanada’s Keystone XL to the south, Enbridge’s Line 3 to the southeast and, of course, the soon-to-be Canadian government’s Trans Mountain pipeline to the B.C. West Coast.

That part of the story was widely reported. The Globe and Mail and Calgary Herald had staff writers on it, while many others, including CTV, Global, Toronto Star, Financial Post, National Observer and others published coverage put together by the Canadian Press.

But none of the articles name climate change, emissions or carbon.

The Canadian Press, in a piece of longer coverage published by several outlets, did include a quote from Greenpeace’s Keith Stewart aimed at the oil industry: “The harsh truth that they need to face is that in 2035 we won’t be buying what they are selling, and that’s a good thing if we want our kids to inherit a livable planet.”

But that’s as far as the topic was explored.

Why didn’t media tell the full story?

How every major media outlet in Canada forget to mention the climate implications of a 60 per cent increase in oilsands production by 2035 is anybody’s guess.

But when it comes to quantifying just how pervasive the problem is, at least one individual is trying.

Elliott did a search of major Canadian daily publications in June using the ProQuest database and found 54 articles that mentioned climate change and CAPP.

“Most were just a straight summary of CAPP president Tim McMillan’s speech at the Global Petroleum Show, where he laid out the association’s forecasts,” Elliott says.

For example, the article by the CBC, whose newsrooms have experienced extensive cuts, is composed entirely by paraphrasing and quoting CAPP and its CEO Tim McMillan.

Eighteen of the articles Elliot found linked CAPP’s forecasts to climate change.

But they almost exclusively framed CAPP’s forecasts in terms of the cost of climate action for industry — parroting “CAPP’s claim that it will cost $25 billion to meet carbon reduction targets,” Elliot said.

In terms of media shaping political attitudes, Simon Dalby, professor of geography and environmental studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, said “it is often their agenda-setting function that is more important than the detailed reportage of particular issues.”

The standard narrative of economic prosperity based on resource sector jobs, “forecloses serious political discussion of alternative economic strategies and the huge injustices that resource extraction involves,” Dalby told The Narwhal.

“The problem is expectations of rising oil prices in the long term and rising oilsands production are just not consistent with Canada (and the world’s) goal to maintain a liveable climate,” says Peter Erickson, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute’s Seattle office.

“That points to the role for the media to point out the inconsistency, indeed the double-speak, of any industry that claims to be contributing to climate stability while in fact it is betting on the opposite and further locking in a fossil fuel based economy. ”

The Globe and Mail, which recently downsized its paper publication, ran a story with no mention of climate by long-time energy reporter Shawn McCarthy. McCarthy has covered climate implications of the industry previously and since.

Asked why climate was omitted this time, McCarthy told The Narwhal by e-mail, “If I had had more space, I could have spent some time describing the difference between industry expectations of continued growth — whether based on IEA scenario or the broad assumption about growing middle class in emerging markets like India and China — and contrasted that with the carbon imperative.”

So, what are the climate implications of CAPP’s forecast?

Over the course of 2017, the Alberta oilsands produced one billion barrels of oil. CAPP anticipates that figure will grow 60 per cent during the next two decades.

A recent CAPP report, Canada’s Role in the Global Energy Mix, reveals the industry group’s singular line of thought: “The world’s thirst for energy is on the rise and Canada has an opportunity to meet the growing global demand for energy…”

To justify this, CAPP selectively based its forecast on a scenario put forward by the International Energy Agency (IEA) — one of the world’s most influential sources of industry information — in its 2017 World Energy Outlook.

Oil Change International and the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis calculate that the scenario would bring about warming of around 2.8 to 3.3 degrees Celsius — far above the threshold of 2 degrees scientists have set as an upper limit.

The centrepiece of the world’s 2015 Paris Accord (which, it’s worth pointing out, is non-binding) is an ambition to limit an increase in global temperatures to as close to 1.5 degrees Celsius as possible.

Interestingly, the IEA produced two other scenarios that assume a more rapid reduction in global emissions. Both of these scenarios would see oil production decrease significantly from today. In its forecasting for Canada, CAPP disregards these alternative scenarios.

Canada has committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030 — a Harper government commitment that was reaffirmed by the Trudeau government in late 2015. This amounts to a drop down to 524 megatonnes (Mt) of carbon dioxide equivalent a year.

Keeping temperature increases below 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming would require a reduction to 400 Mt by 2030.

Beyond this, Canada has committed to an 80 per cent reduction in emissions by 2050, a goal that would limit annual emissions 150 Mt.

Should the oilsands grow as CAPP predicts, that one industry  would eat up 22 per cent of Canada’s total emissions in 2030 and a staggering 78 per cent of allowable emissions in 2050.

That puts a lot of pressure on Canada’s other economic sectors to eliminate their emissions almost entirely. In the absence of that, Canada’s climate targets will be incredibly difficult to meet.

* Update August 16, 2018 8:22am pst: We’ve adjusted this paragraph to state CAPP’s projections assume emissions won’t stay within the climate limits set in the goals of the Paris Agreement. This is to recognize the disparity between the Paris Agreement’s own goal of limiting temperature increases as close to 1.5 degrees Celsius as possible and the targets of member countries that, to this point, are insufficient to meet that goal. Further on this point, CAPP wrote to The Narwhal to say it is incorrect to state projections contained in the 2018 forecast “assume in any way a world where future emissions don’t stay within the climate limits set in the Paris Agreement.” However, this is at best debatable. We reached out to Greg Muttitt, research director at Oil Change International, who put it plainly: “There is no realistic scenario in which there is demand for expanded tar sands production while the world achieves the Paris goals, as numerous studies have shown. Whether Canada’s share of production share is determined by territorial emissions limits, market competition, economic efficiency or supply-side equity, achieving the Paris goals means no new tar sands. To my knowledge, CAPP has never addressed the question of what the energy world would look like for the goals to be achieved, and how that would affect Canadian production.”

** Update August 14, 2018 1:02pm pst: CAPP’s 2018 crude oil forecast relied on a survey of oilsands producers, not the International Energy Agency’s “New Policies Scenario” as previously reported. CAPP’s report, Canada’s Role in the Global Energy Mix, relies on the IEA’s new policies scenario.

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B.C.’s scientific inquiry into fracking won’t address risks to public health, the government quietly assured the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) nearly six weeks before government publicly announced the inquiry on Thursday.

B.C. also assured CAPP the inquiry would not address industry’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, according to documents obtained by DeSmog Canada.

“You have the preeminent industry association in the country given six weeks advance notice not only about the inquiry itself but a clear indication that key things are simply not going to be addressed,” Ben Parfitt, an investigative journalist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, told DeSmog Canada.

”I’m deeply troubled by that.”

In November the CCPA, along with 16 partner organizations, called on the B.C. government to launch a broad-reaching public inquiry into all aspects of the fracking industry, after Parfitt revealed several companies had built unlicensed dams to hold water for frack operations.

The groups renewed that call in December after a leaked report showed the B.C. Oil and Gas Commission had kept information about potentially hundreds of leaking oil and gas wells hidden for four years.

“I am extremely worried and all the groups that signed on to a call for an inquiry are extremely concerned about what we see here,” Parfitt said.

Nearly six weeks before B.C. announced its review of the fracking process, CAPP was notified the inquiry would focus only on water usage and induced earthquakes from fracking operations.

Government also made CAPP aware the province would not conduct a full public inquiry as had been requested by civil society groups, that the panel would consist of three academics and would conduct its work in April and May.

None of the 17 organizations that made the call for a public inquiry into fracking were notified of government’s intentions to launch a scientific panel.

The B.C. Ministry of Mines and Petroleum Resources did not answer questions about the nature of its consultation with CAPP or whether the industry association made specific recommendations regarding the province’s scientific inquiry. CAPP did not respond to a request for comment.

Significant harms to human health associated with fracking

The announcement of B.C.’s scientific inquiry this week coincides with the release in the U.S. of the most authoritative study of fracking’s threats to human health ever published.

The compendium, a 266-page report which draws from nearly 1,300 peer-reviewed studies, reports and investigations, was released by the Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Concerned Health Professionals of New York.

The report found “no evidence that fracking can be practiced in a manner that does not threaten human health” and puts B.C.’s avoidance of health impacts in its scientific inquiry conspicuously on display according to Barbara Gottlieb, director for environment and health at Physicians for Social Responsibility and one of the co-authors of the study.

“I’m so glad to hear there is going to be a government scientific review of fracking,” Gottlieb told DeSmog Canada. “I’m struck there are no health voices on the panel.”

The body of information addressing the threats fracking poses to human health is enormous, Gottlieb said, adding the bulk of the research has been conducted in the last five years.

“The most important thing to note is that we can say with certainty fracking causes harm to human health.”

Recent research has demonstrated a real statistical correlation between those living close to fracking sites and an increase in hospitalization for numerous causes, including increased asthma, harm to fetuses and premature birth which is the leading cause of premature death in infants in the U.S., Gottlieb and her co-authors found.

“For a long time the information was largely anecdotal, largely at the level of symptoms, so we’d see people living near fracking sites had headaches or sudden and severe nosebleeds.”

The research now shows a strong connection between serious harm and proximity to fracking operations, Gottlieb said, noting the occupational risk to those working for the oil and gas industry.

“The extraction sites are dangerous,” she said.

Amy Lubik, member of the Public Health Association of B.C., one of the groups that called on government to launch a public inquiry into fracking, said much of the research into the impacts of fracking on human health has been done in the U.S.

“There aren’t a lot of studies in B.C. around the impacts on health,” Lubik told DeSmog Canada. “It’s one of the reasons why we were hoping the government was going to examine fracking in a public inquiry.”

Lubik, who is an environmental health scientist with the B.C. Centre for Disease Control, said many other jurisdictions that have placed a ban or moratorium on fracking have done so precisely because of risks to health.

“I think we need to do a hell of a lot more research,” she said. “We talk about the chemical issue a lot with the different groups in public health. What about the people that are living and working in these industries?”

Lubik added when it comes to public health, emissions associated with the industry are also of significant concern.

“Climate change is the biggest public health risk of our time. If we aren’t meeting our Paris targets, we will put a lot of people’s health at risk.”

Emissions impact of fracking overlooked

Scientist John Werring with the David Suzuki Foundation, also a signatory of the call for a broad public inquiry into fracking, has spent the last several years measuring the impacts of leaking methane from oil and gas infrastructure in B.C.

Werring’s research found fugitive methane — an extremely potent greenhouse gas — is escaping at much higher rates than previously estimated by government or industry. A report published in collaboration between the David Suzuki Foundation and St. Xavier University recommended B.C. require industry to provide regular monitoring and reporting of fugitive emissions.

Werring said he’s disappointed B.C.’s scientific review of fracking was designed to exclude looking at those fugitive emissions.

“I think unfortunately that this is a very, very, very narrowly focused scientific review,” Werring told DeSmog Canada.

While there are environmental hazards associated with the fracking process itself, Werring said much of the impacts of fracking happen above ground.

“When we’re talking, for example, about the issue of fugitive emissions, they contain potentially toxic components that have adverse impacts on human health. These are things like benzene, toluene and hydrogen sulfide gas.”

“There is nothing here in government’s scientific review that they are going to look at the human health impacts. Nothing,” Werring said.

Gottlieb said tracking methane is important for tracking the larger movement of contaminants away from fracking sites and into communities. She added there is no known safe threshold for exposure to benzene, which causes cancer.

“The fracking site is where the gas is extracted but then the methane is carried to processing stations and then carried often hundreds of miles to power stations or increasingly in the U.S. there is a push to liquify natural gas,” she said.

Those pipelines carry with them some of the dangerous substances that come out of the ground with the methane, including particulate matter, volatile organic compounds and often radioactive material, Gottlieb said.

“These dangerous substance are not only causing sickness and hospitalization and so on where this is extracted but this whole pipeline and infrastructure system carries this toxic material with them and into communities hundreds of miles away.”

“We’re all stakeholders in regards to fracking.”

Stronger review needed

Gottlieb said in her home state of Maryland, where there is a current ban on fracking, Physicians for Social Responsibility pushed for health voices to be included in reviews of the industry’s impacts there.*

She said B.C. may be well counselled to embed a health professional in their review.

Lubik said there is still time for B.C. to alter the scope of its inquiry.

“I think there’s definitely still an opportunity — they haven’t even started yet.”

Parfitt said beyond assessing the health and emission impacts of the fracking industry in B.C., a meaningful inquiry would address the efficacy of the regulatory environment in the province.

“This review isn’t going to come anywhere remotely close to what our organization and other organizations felt was critical to be addressed by a much broader, fulsome public inquiry,” Parfitt said.

There have been too many examples of the regulator failing to protect the public’s interest, Parfitt said.

“We believe very strongly they’re not going to wrestle this beast to the ground if they’re not willing to look at how this industry is regulated.”

Fracking Inquiry Correspondence March 2018 by DeSmog Canada on Scribd

*Update: Wednesday March 21, 2018 6:45 p.m. PST. This article has been updated to reflect the fact that the state of Maryland has a ban on fracking and not a moratorium as previously stated.*

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The Alberta government and an unlikely crew of allies — including Greenpeace, an oil lobbying firm, Ecojustice and attorneys general of four different provinces — are squaring off with ATB Financial in a Supreme Court case that could let polluters off the hook when they go bankrupt.

The question being tried is whether creditors, like banks, can pick and choose the best assets an oil company owns when it goes bust, or whether governments can use a company’s good assets to pay to clean up its messes before the banks get paid.

At the granular level, the specific case at issue began when Redwater Energy went under in 2015. Its bank, ATB Financial, turned its nose up at nearly 80 per cent of its assets instead of taking the lot.

“Of the 97 or so properties owned by Redwater energy, [ATB] purported to accept only 20 wells — the profitable wells — and leave behind the unprofitable wells and a pipeline,” says Ecojustice lawyer Kurt Stillwell.

“The Alberta Energy Regulator ordered the trustee to properly abandon the wells. It refused.”

That attempt to ditch the bad assets kicked off a series of court cases and appeals, the most recent of which was argued before the Supreme Court in mid-February. The verdict isn’t expected for several months.

In an odd twist of fate, the case has the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers fighting on the same side as Ecojustice and Greenpeace.

“It’s unusual…we didn’t have necessarily the same arguments,” said Keith Stewart, climate and energy campaigner at Greenpeace. “They’re trying to make sure solvent companies shouldn’t have to pay for these costs; we’re trying to make sure the environment doesn’t bear the cost.”

Ramifications for Other Sectors

The Alberta Energy Regulator’s CEO Jim Ellis put out a statement emphasizing the potential scope of the case.

“We can’t emphasize this enough: this is not an Alberta problem,” Ellis wrote. “This is not an oil and gas problem. It can be applied to industrial sites left behind by companies in other industries, allowing receivers to take and sell for the benefit of creditors the good assets and walk away from the bad ones and the end-of-life obligations associated with them.”

Greenpeace echoes the energy regulator; Stewart says the result could affect the way a whole swath of resource extraction companies are regulated.

“This case is really important because it’s not just oil and gas,” Stewart says. “The precedent it’s setting could apply to mines or forestry companies — boom and bust industries.”

The case could also determine how other sectors — like forestry or mining — manage their own environmental cleanup https://t.co/hjwmehsQHn

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) February 23, 2018

Spike in Orphan Wells

Ellis blames the original ruling (in favour of the bank) for causing a jump in the number of oil wells that have been “disclaimed” or not remediated (“abandoned,” in industry-speak, is actually a good thing, meaning the well has been capped and is ready for remediation).

For the oil industry, this means an extra financial burden for the companies that haven’t gone bankrupt — and in a financial downturn, that is usually smaller players, not the Exxons and BPs of the world — via the Orphan Well Association, an industry-funded organization that manages wells that haven’t been properly abandoned and reclaimed. The number of wells on the Orphan Well Association’s books has shot up more than threefold since the Redwater ruling, from 1,200 to 3,700.

Since funding is collected from well owners depending on their estimated liabilities, a crash in oil prices, like in 2014, and a series of bankruptcies like that of Redwater Energy, can mean provincial taxpayers are left holding the bag for cleanups.

Tony Bruder has experienced that firsthand on his own land. Two inactive sour gas wells on his property were left idle for decades before the Alberta Energy Regulator ordered its owners to clean up the mess, and when the company failed to comply, the regulator did the job itself.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that the companies have to be held responsible,” says Bruder. “And in order for that to happen properly, the Alberta government, which gave those companies the right to drill…they have to be willing to stand behind the decisions they’ve made, and hold those companies accountable.”

But the Redwater case could mean the provincial government loses its authority to hold companies responsible. The deciding factor will be whether the government’s jurisdiction over environmental regulation means it can overrule federal bankruptcy laws.

The case is being anxiously watched by all sides. In an emailed statement, ATB Financial said the ruling will provide certainty to a law that has been on the books for over 25 years.

“Whatever the decision of the Supreme Court, the clarity and certainty it will provide is important to all parties in the oil and gas sector and financial institutions who lend to those companies,” it said.

“We, and all the other creditors to the industry, are interested observers in the outcome.”

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Sharks, sea turtles, corals, wolffish — the 1,200 kilometre Laurentian Channel off the southwest coast of Newfoundland is home to tremendous biodiversity.

And that’s the reason it’s set to become Canada’s newest Marine Protected Area, a designation designed to conserve and protect vulnerable species and ecosystems.

There’s just one catch: draft regulations for the proposed 11,619 square-kilometre protected area allow oil and gas exploration and drilling for much of the year. In addition, the government has reduced the size of the protected area by more than one-third from what was originally planned.

Documents obtained by The Narwhal paint a picture of a disturbingly close relationship between the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) and provides clues of how a “marine protected area” ended up allowing offshore oil drilling.

Canada is in a hurry to classify more marine areas as “protected” to meet an international target to protect 10 per cent of its oceans by  2020. Whether an area that allows offshore drilling will even qualify as protected is the subject of heated international debate.

ICYMI: Is Canada Fudging the Numbers on its Marine Protection Progress?

But “high confidence estimates” of up to 257 million barrels of oil and four trillion cubic feet of natural gas put the Laurentian Channel in the crosshairs of conservation and resource extraction.

The documents — obtained by The Narwhal via access to information legislation — reveal that lobbying meetings took place between government and industry without being recorded properly in the federal registry and that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans provided the oil industry lobby group with an advance copy of a presentation.

CAPP received advanced copy of DFO presentation

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans conducted more than 30 consultations since mid-2014, when a proposed regulatory framework for the the Laurentian Channel was first distributed.

Stakeholders included the fishing industry, oil and gas players, the Shipping Federation of Canada, environmental organizations, academics, Indigenous groups and various governments. The last consultation of this kind occured on October 28, 2016, with the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Committee on Oceans Management.

CAPP is listed as only having two consultations with DFO as part of this process: once on May 19, 2016, and another on Oct. 20, 2016.

But on the morning of the second meeting, Stephen Snow — DFO’s manager of oceans for Newfoundland and Labrador — sent an intriguing e-mail to Jennifer Matthews, a policy analyst at CAPP.

Both parties indicated that a call occured on Oct. 19 between Snow and CAPP, with the DFO manager beginning his Oct. 20 e-mail as “a follow-up from our discussion yesterday.” Then, Snow explained that he was attaching a draft presentation about marine conservation targets that he would be presenting that afternoon.

“As we have now concluded consultations with all stakeholders, we have not been giving out the presentation as it contains sensitive information from a DFO perspective that needs to be accompanied with the ‘Presenter,’ ” Snow wrote.  Following that, he specifically requested that CAPP “not share or distribute the power point and delete it as we agreed.”

Excerpt from documents released to The Narwhal via Freedom of Information Legislation. The e-mail exchange shows Stephen Snow, DFO’s manager of oceans for Newfoundland and Labrador, requesting CAPP review, then delete, a presentation regarding marine conservation targets.

This communication raises some big questions, according to Gretchen Fitzgerald,  director of Sierra Club Canada’s Atlantic region chapter.

“It seems like there’s some advanced notice and even some discussions that are happening alluded to in the e-mail that would make you think there’s a little bit too much collaboration going on,” Fitzgerald told The Narwhal.

“It’s just worrying when you see people getting documents in advance of what’s supposed to be a public multi-stakeholder consultation, and being given more opportunity to prepare and an inside-track on these consultations that are supposed to put everybody on an equal footing.”

Stella Ruddock, communications officer for DFO, said in an interview with The Narhwhal that the presentation was sent out early as CAPP had employees in Halifax as well as on the ground in Newfoundland, where the meeting was held, and that it was an attempt to “try to speed up the process of getting the meeting going on time.”

She said that DFO requested that CAPP not share the presentation as “there were maps in the presentation that DFO felt might be misconstrued, I guess, if they weren’t accompanied by the presenter. They felt that if it got out, if it was circulated without the presenter, it might be misunderstood.”

Ruddock couldn’t comment on which specific maps were considered sensitive, or if it’s standard practice for DFO to send out a draft presentation to stakeholders prior to a consultation.

10 CAPP members meet with DFO days after draft regs published

On June 27, 2017 — only three days after the draft regulations for the marine protected area were published in the Canada Gazette — CAPP and at least six other industry heavyweights met with DFO for 45 minutes.

That list included senior representatives from BP, Shell Canada, ExxonMobil, Nexen, Suncor and Statoil. However, e-mails from both CAPP and DFO made reference to “10 CAPP members,” suggesting more may have been present in the room.

Only CAPP and ExxonMobil actually registered the communication in the federal lobbying registry.

ICYMI: BP Wants to Drill Underwater Wells Twice the Depth of Deepwater Horizon in Canada

All companies should have registered the meeting, regardless of it being organized by CAPP, said Duff Conacher, founder of Democracy Watch.

“My opinion is that the companies violated the Lobbying Act by failing to register the meeting in the monthly communications registry,” Conacher said.

BP wasn’t even registered to lobby the federal government (and hadn’t been since 2014).

DFO wanted voluntary commitment not to drill in conservation area

A scenario note prepared for DFO’s senior assistant deputy minister of ecosystems and fisheries management Kevin Stringer noted that CAPP members “will likely raise questions on the intention of the government to prohibit or limit current or future oil and gas activities in MPAs in general, but more specifically in the proposed Laurentian Channel Oceans Act MPA.”

It also noted that DFO’s main objective for the meeting was to ascertain if CAPP would be willing to “demonstrate its marine stewardship commitment” by supporting a statement that “no calls for bid on leases in the Laurentian Channel will ever be issued in support of the long-term conservation of the area.”

It appears DFO did not meet that goal.

A summary of the meeting e-mailed out on July 10, 2017, stated that “there was some discussion about Laurentian Channel but not in detail or in any conclusive way; there was agreement to have an ongoing dialogue.”

Fitzgerald of Sierra Club said in an interview with The Narwhal that it was “quite startling” to see the number of senior representatives who met with DFO on June 27.

“I actually didn’t realize they were so interested in this piece of marine seascape,” she said. “But I think to them, it’s about their right to all the oceans on the East Coast of Canada. That’s the only reason they would assemble such a cast of characters.”

CAPP’s submission claims no serious impacts on marine mammals

Following the publication of the draft regulations on June, there was a 30-day window for public comment.

On July 21, three days before the window closed, CAPP sent its final comments to DFO. Signed by Paul Barnes — the director of the Atlantic Canada and Arctic regions for the association — the letter outlines CAPP’s argument for why it thinks that seismic and drilling activity in the region wouldn’t be seriously harmful to species and ecosystems.

Specifically, CAPP emphasized there have been no documented marine mammal injuries or deaths as a result of seismic surveys. In addition, it noted that impacts of drilling and production at two large offshore sites in Atlantic Canada have had negligible impacts on sediment and water quality monitoring.

Rodolphe Devillers, geography professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland and lead researcher at the Marine Geomatics Research Lab, reviewed CAPP’s final submission and said in an interview with The Narwhal that the facts presented appear accurate. However, he added the caveat:  “It’s just always a question of what facts they select in their letters and not others.”

For example, it’s true that there haven’t been any documented marine mammal mortalities as a consequence of seismic surveys, as it’s very difficult to relate deaths to specific sources.

It’s also consistent with the conservation objectives listed in the federal government’s draft regulations, with a particular focus on preventing “human-induced mortality.”

But as noted by Devillers, the overarching objective of the MPA is to “conserve biodiversity through the protection of key species and their habitats, ecosystem structure and function, and through scientific research.”

To him, and many other ocean scientists, that overarching objective requires the prevention of a wide range of disturbance and harms, not just deaths — something largely unknown due to a lack of scientific studies in the region.

“We do know as scientists that seismic activities do have a number of impacts, which can be loss of hearing, challenges to feed and communicate … Those affect the primary objective of the MPA.”

Seismic testing ‘serious’ pollutant: scientists

A 2013 report by Dalhousie University biologist Lindy Weilgart concluded that at least 37 marine species have been shown to be impacted by seismic testing, and that airgun noise “must be considered a serious marine environmental pollutant.”

On June 22, 2017 — incidentally, a single day before the government released its draft regulations — an article was published in Nature Ecology & Evolution that concluded seismic surveys can double or triple the death rates of zooplankton within a 1.2 kilometre radius. The authors wrote: “Significant impacts on plankton by anthropogenic sources have enormous implications for ocean ecosystem structure and health.”

Devillers voiced similar concerns about CAPP’s positioning on potential contamination.

In the final submission, CAPP said that no drill waste or petrogenic hydrocarbons have ever been detected “outside the 500 metre safety zone during drilling or operations phases” of nearby offshore projects. But Devillers noted that “even if it’s within 100 metres, it’s an impact on the ecosystem.”

“Sometimes things go wrong,” he said. “How willing are we to accept that things can go wrong? Even if it’s one chance in 50 years or something, that’s not acceptable. And they cannot guarantee that this will not happen.”

A simple fix could set clear standard for marine protected areas

A simple solution to all of this would be to amend the Oceans Act to prohibit all extractive activities in Marine Protected Areas, said Linda Nowlan, staff lawyer with West Coast Environmental Law.

Currently, each distinct protected area  is governed by an individual regulation, which can prohibit and allow certain activities. That’s why the Laurentian Channel Marine Protected Area allows oil and gas activities while the nearby St. Anns Bank Marine Protected Area banned them.

In comparison, Canada’s “National Marine Conservation Areas” — which include Ontario’s Fathom Five National Marine Park and Quebec’s Saguenay-St. Lawrence Marine Park — have a blanket prohibition of oil and gas activities.

Nowlan suggested the federal government should take advantage of its ongoing amendments to the Oceans Act to prohibit all “harmful activities,” including oil, gas and mineral exploration and development.

“It sets the bar from the start so industries can’t go into negotiations and whittle down protection, which is what seems to have happened in Laurentian Channel,” Nowlan said.

The government is expected to release the final regulations this year.

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By Shannon Daub & Zoë Yunker.

Newly uncovered documents obtained through Freedom of Information requests reveal the cozy relationship between the fossil fuel industry and the last B.C. government went even further than suspected — all the way to inviting industry to directly craft the province’s climate “leadership” plan.

Let’s rewind for a second: back in the spring of 2015, then-premier Christy Clark announced the provincial government would create a new climate plan.

A 17-member climate leadership team was appointed and tasked with developing recommendations to meet B.C.’s greenhouse gas reduction targets. The government released the team’s recommendations in the fall of 2015 — allowing then-Premier Christy Clark head off to Paris for the December 2015 UN climate talks cloaked in the mantle of climate “leadership,” after four years of near-total inaction by her government.

That’s where things got interesting.

Documents obtained via Freedom of Information legislation indicate that while the Paris talks were underway, the government launched a closed-door three month-long process to work jointly with the oil and gas industry to revise and re-write the climate leadership team recommendations.

The process entailed five rounds of meetings over three months with all the key corporate players, from oil and gas producers to distributors. It was divided into working groups on the carbon tax; methane and fugitive emissions (i.e., from natural gas production, a significant source of B.C.’s greenhouse emissions); and electrification (i.e., the provision of cheap electricity to natural gas extraction sites and LNG plants in order to make gas production less GHG-intensive).

Notably, most of these B.C. government-organized meetings took place not in B.C., but in Calgary — specifically in the boardroom of the most powerful fossil fuel lobby group in the country, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP).

The documents include a power point deck dated January 2016 that outlines the process for the “Climate Leadership Team Recommendations – Consultation with Oil and Gas Industry.”

The document is from the Ministry of Natural Gas Development, which led the “consultation”— not the Climate Action Secretariat, which coordinated the Climate Leadership Team (and, as far as the public knew, was the lead government agency working on the plan). The documents released also include agendas from one round of working group meetings on January 13, 2016, along with the attendee lists for those meetings.

These lists show that senior officials from the Ministry of Natural Gas Development, the Climate Action Secretariat and BC Hydro attended the January 13 meetings in person. We do not yet have access to the daily calendars for several other senior officials who we believe may also have been present.

Also in attendance were over two dozen representatives from at least 16 oil and gas corporations and industry groups, including the B.C. LNG Alliance (which also had a seat on the official Climate Leadership Team), Canadian Natural Resources Limited, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Encana, Imperial Oil, Nexen/CNOOC, Progress Energy (wholly owned subsidiary of Malaysian state-owned Petronas), Shell Canada, Suncor, Teck, Woodfibre Energy, CAPP and others.

Recall that when the climate leadership plan was released in the summer of 2016 it largely ignored the leadership team’s 32 recommendations, in what was dubbed by some as a “climate non-plan.”

Meet the Real Climate “Leadership” Team: Big Oil and Gas Corporations

Most troubling of all is that this was much more than a “consultation” process.

The documents obtained make it clear that in fact the process constituted an invitation to the country’s most powerful oil and gas companies to shape both the substance and language of B.C.’s next climate plan.

For example, the working groups on methane emissions and electrification were each asked to “refine language in CLT recommendation” and to “add detail and process direction” regarding timing and whether policy measures would be voluntary or regulatory. The working group on the carbon tax was asked to “ensure consistency with other jurisdictions” and to “determine ‘the art of the possible’ (how much and how fast).”

The working groups were asked to come together to “work on offsets.” The timeline for the working groups also include the action item “finalize language” for the “CLP Framework” (ie, Climate Leadership Plan Framework).

Our FOI request asked for minutes and/or summaries of the meetings and industry consultation process, but none were released to us. Pages 19 to 38 of the relevant records were withheld on the grounds they constitute advice or recommendations to a public body or minister (S. 13) and/or that they would be harmful to the business interests of a third party (S. 21).

Perhaps these missing pages are the minutes and summaries. Or perhaps they are something else. We have asked the Information and Privacy Commissioner to review the government’s decision to withhold these records.

It should be noted that it took two FOI attempts to even receive this much information. In July 2016, we submitted identical requests to the Ministry of Environment/Climate Action Secretariat and the Ministry of Natural Gas Development for documents relating to any meetings or other communication between the fossil fuel industry and senior officials in relation to a wide range of energy and climate policy matters starting in January 2016.

The Ministry of Natural Gas Development withheld all documents having to do with the industry engagement process and Calgary meetings.

The Ministry of Environment released the agendas for the January 13 working group meetings (just the agendas, no other contextual information). It was only through a follow-up request to the Ministry of Natural Gas Development (now part of the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources) that we obtained the fuller set of documents reviewed here. These should all have been released in response to our initial request, along with material from the other rounds of working group meetings (and who knows what else).

A Stunning Example of Institutional Corruption

In sum, the B.C. government carried out secret meetings in another province with an industry that is a top contributor to the BC Liberal Party to shape policy that ought to constrain that very industry — as any meaningful climate policy must do in relation to the fossil fuel sector.

Ironically, none of these meetings “count” as lobbying under B.C.’s current Lobbyist Registration Act, which doesn’t require meetings or communication invited by public officials to be reported by lobbyists. Meanwhile, no other sector — environmental organizations, First Nations, etc. — could even dream of this kind of access.

BC’s Last #Climate 'Leadership' Plan Was Written in Big Oil’s Boardroom (Literally) https://t.co/lUKX67Hsy9 #bcpoli @CCPA_BC @bcliberals

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) September 18, 2017

This is more than a case of ideological alignment between a corporate-friendly party and its corporate donors. It is a profound blurring of the lines between government and industry, who set out to make policy together behind closed doors, while what can only now be characterized as a pretend consultation process was acted out publicly.

This blurring of the lines is an example of what ethicists refer to as “institutional corruption:” a “systemic and strategic influence that undermines the institution’s effectiveness by diverting it from its purpose or weakening its ability to achieve its purpose, including…weakening either the public’s trust in that institution or the institution’s inherent trustworthiness.”

The whole charade also represents an abuse of the climate leadership team’s time and a mockery of B.C.’s claims to leadership during the Paris climate talks, not to mention a tremendous waste of public resources.

How much did the province spend on the climate leadership team process — convening the 17-member team for meetings, carrying out extensive climate modeling to support their deliberations (services that were contracted from the private firm Navius, no doubt at significant expense) and public consultation activities? How many thousands of hours of staff time were spent by ministry personnel to support it all?

B.C.’s new government has committed to more ambitious climate policies than what the previous Liberal government outlined in its non-plan last year. But with the fossil fuel industry accustomed to putting pen to paper on policy and regulation, a great deal of political will is required to move forward. And that ban on corporate donations to political parties? It can’t come soon enough.

   —

Shannon Daub is Associate Director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives B.C. Office, and co-director of the Corporate Mapping Project. Zoe Yunker is Zoë is a graduate student in the Sociology Department at the University of Victoria and a research assistant with the Corporate Mapping Project.

This report is published as part of the Corporate Mapping Project, a research and public engagement initiative investigating the power of the fossil fuel industry. The CMP is jointly led by the University of Victoria, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ B.C. and Saskatchewan offices, and the Parkland Institute. In March, the project reported on the millions of dollars donated by the fossil fuel industry in recent years to B.C. political parties.  This research is supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

DeSmog Canada is a community partner of the Corporate Mapping Project.

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The fossil fuel industry lobbied the B.C. government more than 22,000 times between April 2010 and October 2016, according to a report released Wednesday by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives as part of the Corporate Mapping Project.

The report also found that 48 fossil fuel companies and associated industry groups have donated $5.2 million to B.C. political parties between 2008 and 2015 — 92 per cent of which has gone to the BC Liberals.

The analysis found seven of the top 10 political donors from the fossil fuel industry are also B.C.’s most active lobbyists.

The Corporate Mapping Project is a six-year research and public engagement initiative jointly led by the University of Victoria, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and the Alberta-based Parkland Institute.

Researchers have painstakingly analyzed lobbying and political donation records to demonstrate the extensive political influence of the fossil fuel industry in B.C.

“I was definitely surprised at the sheer volume of lobbying contacts that we found,” Nick Graham, lead author of the report and PhD candidate at the University of Victoria, told DeSmog Canada.

Spectra Energy, Enbridge, FortisBC, Encana, Chevron Canada, CAPP and Teck Resources conducted the majority of registered lobbying contacts, more than 19,500 in total since the lobbyist registry was first initiated in 2010 — an average of 14 lobbying contacts in B.C. per day.

“We were expecting to see some overlap between political donations and lobbying,” Graham said. “Part of what donations help achieve is access to government so we certainly expected to see some of that.”

The top 10 fossil fuel industry donors were responsible for $3.8 million in contributions to the BC Liberals and $270,000 to the BC NDP.

The Corporate Mapping Project report, co-authored by Shannon Daub of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and Bill Carroll, professor of sociology at the University of Victoria, is the first systematic analysis of fossil fuel lobbying in B.C.

Top 10 fossil fuel industry donors in B.C. Source: CCPA, Corporate Mapping Project.

Clear Connection Between Lobbying, Donations and Policy Outcomes

“There is a fairly clear connection between lobbying, donations and policy outcomes that is quite troubling,” Daub told DeSmog Canada.

“It can be difficult to draw a line between a political donation or a meeting and policy because so little information is released to the public about what is going on behind closed doors,” Daub said.

But, she added, a more broad analysis like this can help connect the dots.

“We did note the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, for example, in a one year period between October 2015 and August 2016, reported 201 lobbying contacts with the provincial government specifically in relation to the climate leadership plan.”

“And of course that plan turned out to not be much of a plan at all,” Daub added.

The analysis found 28 per cent of lobbying by the top fossil fuel lobbyists was with cabinet ministers.

Several cabinet ministers were the frequent target of lobbying contacts, the most popular being Minister of Natural Gas Development Rich Coleman, who was listed in 733 contacts with the top 10 fossil fuel firms.

The other most contacted senior ministers are Premier Christy Clark (618 contacts), Minister of Energy and Mines Bill Bennett (437), Environment Minister Mary Polak (354) and Finance Minister Mike de Jong (330).

“It really does speak to the development of these close relationships,” Graham said. “You do see particular firms heavily targeting individuals. There is this really tight, if not cozy, ongoing relationship that develops and the perspective of the two become quite closely aligned.”

Companies such as Encana, with significant operations in B.C.’s natural gas plays focused heavily on lobbying Natural Gas Development Minister Coleman, the analysis found.

Source: CCPA, Corporate Mapping Project

Corporate Influence Far Outweighs Environmental Voices

Graham added the analysis was shaped in part by the B.C. government’s push for increased extractive industry projects in the province for nearly the last decade.

“The paper began from the perspective of seeing this really incredible push around expanding fossil fuel development in the province especially around natural gas and the really aggressive promotion of the LNG industry in particular by the government.”

“Part of our question was, ‘how can we explain this? What explains this?’ ” Graham said.

“What we found are there are multiple explanations that point to the structural power of industry and the provincial government’s reliance on resource rent. But also major corporate influence: the ability of corporations to have these stores of capital to pressure government on an ongoing basis.”

The analysis found a total of 1,300 lobby contacts between the government and environmental or non-governmental organizations during the same timeframe.

Daub said there is clearly not level access to provincial decision-makers in B.C.

“What shows really clearly from these numbers is that we have one industry with a very disproportionate level of access to government and government policy,” she said.

B.C.’s Ongoing Transparency Problem

B.C. has some of the weakest political donation rules in the country, which allow unlimited donations from individuals, foreigners, corporations and unions.

“Clearly it’s just time to ban big money in politics all together. One of the recommendations in our report is to put a stop to corporate and union donations and a cap on individual contributions.”

Federally, political parties cannot accept donations from corporations or unions and provinces like Quebec place a $100 limit on personal donations.

“It’s supposed to be one person, one vote,” Daub said. “Instead in B.C. it’s more like one dollar, one vote.”

A level democratic playing field is important for the public to have confidence in the political system but also to feel they can meaningfully participate in the process, Daub said.

Beyond problems with special interest dollars flooding the political process, B.C. also has poor transparency requirements when it comes to lobbying.

Lobbyists must register to lobby in B.C. and provide a list of intended meetings. However, there is no official record kept that distinguishes between intended and actual meetings.

Any meetings requested by public officials are not registered.

In addition, lobby records do not give the public detailed information about the content of meetings.

“Teck is one of the biggest lobbyists in the province among industry groups and they have a particular focus on MLAs,” Daub said. “But what they report they’ve lobbied on is things like ‘mining,’ or ‘employment and training’ or ‘aboriginal affairs.’ ”

“That doesn’t tell us anything about what they’re actually talking to these public officials about.”

Daub said better records should be kept of lobbying interactions that gives the public a decent account of when and how frequently these meetings are taking place and what public policy matters are at stake.

“A more transparent system would make it much easier for the public to find out what is going on in these closed door meetings.”

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The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), Canada’s largest oil and gas lobbyist group, asked the federal government to introduce a carbon pricing scheme that would “recycle” revenues back into oil and gas operations, documents released via Freedom of Information legislation reveal.

The documents, released to Greenpeace Canada, contain an August 2016 submission CAPP provided to the federal government in which the group argues a price on carbon should be revenue neutral for industry.

“One of the decisions governments need to make is what to do with the revenue generated from the carbon pricing mechanism,” the document reads. “There are many options available to enable innovation for distribution of this generated revenue; CAPP recommends that to enable innovation, revenue generated by industrial emitters is best recycled back to industry for technology and innovation.”

Keith Stewart, senior energy strategist for Greenpeace Canada, says, “The oil industry formally supports action on climate change (in exchange for pipeline approvals) but wants to shape how the policy is implemented so as to minimize the impact on its own operations.”

In a summary piece for Policy Options, Stewart says the recommendation to channel carbon taxes back into industry operations “dramatically weakens the effectiveness of the federal policy.”

“The primacy advantage of a carbon price is that it sends an economy-wide signal to investors and consumers, leading to a shift to lower-carbon options. If the largest share of the revenue goes back to the oil industry, the signal to investors to switch to low-carbon energy is muted.”

Pressure from CAPP comes as the federal government is preparing to release the first Gazette I version of greenhouse gas emissions for the oil and gas sector later this month.

Industry lobbying efforts successfully staved off greenhouse gas emission regulations for the oil and gas sector throughout the entirety of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s 10-year rule. Further lobbying efforts also stymied a European effort to label fuel from the Alberta oilsands as more carbon intensive than other fossil fuels.

Under the international Paris Agreement and the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change, Canada has committed to a 2030 target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 524 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, a 30 per cent reduction from 2005 emission levels.

Environment and Climate Change Canada estimates new oil and gas regulations will reduce emissions by 20 megatonnes (MT), greater than Nova Scotia’s total emissions at 17 MT.

The upstream oil and gas sector is Canada’s fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions.

In addition to imposing a nationwide carbon pricing mechanism — provinces have until 2018 to implement one or have one imposed — the federal government is also implementing regulations to reduce methane emissions from the oil and gas sector.

CAPP Lobbies Government to ‘Recycle’ #CarbonTax Revenues Back to Oil Industry https://t.co/U6ydduAMfn #ableg #cdnpoli @carollinnitt pic.twitter.com/JEtq49vlNk

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) March 3, 2017

CAPP’s Fight Against Methane Regulations

Additional internal documents released to Greenpeace Canada show CAPP overestimated the cost of implementation and argued the new rules will damage industry’s competitiveness.

“Canadian production is already at risk of being displaced by U.S. competition,” a CAPP presentation made to the federal government in September 2016 reads.

It is “not a good time to impose additional costs on industry,” a slide states.

In March 2016, former president Barack Obama and Justin Trudeau announced an ambitious plan to nearly halve methane emissions from the oil and gas sector by 2025.

In Canada the reductions would be the equivalent of removing every passenger car from the roads in both B.C. and Alberta.

Canada’s forthcoming methane regulations are expected to outline how the sector will achieve those reduction targets.

CAPP, however, recommended the federal government delay implementation of methane regulations beyond the currently proposed 2020 and argued some aspects of the rules, such as mandatory retrofitting of all equipment or regular equipment inspections, should be voluntary.

CAPP’s argument that the new rules are too costly is simply a negotiating tactic, Stewart says.

“CAPP says that the cost to industry of implementing the federal methane regulations would be roughly triple what Environment Canada calculates: $4.1 billion over eight years, compared with Environment Canada’s estimate of $1.3 billion,” Stewart writes.

“Industry push-back on environmental regulations is to be expected and is most effective when conducted behind closed doors.”

Image: Machinery operates in the Alberta oilsands. Photo: Kris Krug/DeSmog

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