The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) has more than $4 billion invested in the top 200 publicly traded oil, gas and coal companies, according to a newly released report.

The report by the Corporate Mapping Project and the B.C. office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives looks at whether the investment board considers global warming when investing Canadians’ pension money.

The answer is a resounding “no,” said University of Victoria School of Environmental Studies associate professor James Rowe, one of the report authors and a co-investigator with the Corporate Mapping Project.

“As one of the largest investors in the country, they have a significant role to play in facilitating the needed energy transition and our report shows, unfortunately, they are not fulfilling that role at the moment,” Rowe told The Narwhal.

In order to stay within the 1.5 degree increase in global average temperature — committed to by Canada and  194 other countries in the 2016 Paris Agreement — fossil fuel extraction must be severely limited. But companies with Canada Pension Plan investments have reserves that, if extracted, would send emissions soaring.

“To stay within 1.5 degrees, these companies can extract only 71 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, yet the companies the CPPIB is invested in have 281 billion tonnes in reserve, meaning they have almost four times the carbon reserves that can be sold and ultimately burned to stay within 1.5 degrees,” Rowe said.

Reserves are factored into company valuation, which means the board has invested billions of dollars in companies whose financial worth depends on overshooting their carbon budget, the report says.

Many of the investments are in coal companies — even though the Canadian government has acknowledged that phasing out coal is one of the most important steps in tackling climate change and meeting the Paris Agreement targets.

The Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board manages about $400 billion in investments, making it one of Canada’s largest investment pools.

Oil and gas companies face coming devaluation

Those looking forward to collecting their pension shouldworry about the risk of stranded assets as the world transitions to renewable energy and financial institutions worldwide divest themselves of fossil fuel investments, says the report, which notes the pension’s total investment in fossil fuel companies is considerably larger than the documented $4 billion. The exact amount cannot be estimated due to limited disclosure rules.

“Our worry is that Canadians, who rely on these funds for part of our retirement, are going to be affected by stranded asset risks,” Rowe said.

“Oil and gas companies are facing a significant devaluation in the coming years and so it makes sense to move out now rather than later, which is what we see other institutions doing, but the CPP has not,” he said.

The European Union recently passed a law requiring pension funds to factor climate risk in investment decisions and Norway and California have passed similar laws. The European Investment Bank, the largest multilateral lender in the world, has announced it will no longer be investing in fossil fuel projects after 2021.

Steph Glanzmann, one of the report’s authors and a recent University of British Columbia forestry graduate, said investments in the industry will no longer be profitable

as a new generation shifts away from fossil fuels.

“This is a moral and ecological failure and also a financial risk,” she said.

Investment board should disclose risk

The report recommends that the investment board carry out a portfolio-wide risk analysis and disclose the findings and that the fund should move towards fossil fuel divestment and reinvesting capital into renewable energy. It also calls on the Canadian government to require all public pension plans to fully disclose their fossil fuel holdings.

Many CPP investments are in the biggest companies working in the Alberta oil sands, which produces high-cost, carbon-intensive bitumen. The Alberta energy industry is working to convince investors that its oil and gas is produced sustainably as it scrambles to deal with an estimated $30 billion divested in the last three years, including Sweden’s central bank, which has said it will no longer invest in projects with large climate footprints.

The report found that most divestments are from countries that do not produce oil and gas and suggests that one reason Canada is slow to react could be because its oil and gas industry is so powerful.

“As we noted in the report, a number of board members of CPP are also board members of oil and gas companies and so the interests of fossil fuel companies are influencing the decision making at the CPP and that is dangerous for Canadian pensioners,” Rowe said.

Having these directors at the investment board table means the self-interest of companies contradicts the changes investors and governments need to make to address climate change, said Zoe Yunker, an author of the report and a research assistant with the Corporate Mapping Project.

“In Canada, the fossil fuel sector has been very successful at getting a seat at government decision-making tables, both provincially and federally and CPPIB board directors and staff are entangled with the oil and gas industry,” Yunker said.                

The board’s mandate is to maximise long-term investment returns without undue risk, but the report looks at whether a failure to look at long-term climate change will mean heavy economic costs for future generations and whether it could make the organization vulnerable to a class action lawsuit brought on behalf of young Canadians.

Notably, the organization recently made a $2.63 billion purchase of wind-farm operator Pattern Energy and a November board report says investments in renewable energy companies more than doubled to $3 billion up to June this year, up from $30 million in 2016.

CEO Mark Machin, in an interview with BNN Bloomberg earlier this month, said both renewable and traditional energy are appropriate for the fund’s portfolio.

“We will look at traditional oil and gas, whether it’s pipelines or other resources,” he told Bloomberg.

“As long as we can understand all the risks behind the investment, that the regulation may change, that preference may change, that geography may change. If we can understand those and can still be compensated sufficiently, then we’ll continue to make that investment.”

* This article was updated Wednesday, November 20 at 10:56am pst to include emailed comment from the CCPIB.

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A new report from the Corporate Mapping Project documents the reach of the fossil fuel industry when it comes to lobbying the federal government, raising red flags about what it calls a “troubling shift in lobbying patterns.” 

The report’s findings suggest that industry lobbyists are increasingly focusing on developing closer, long-term relationships with federal bureaucrats rather than elected officials, especially since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took office in 2015.

The report tracked fossil-fuel-industry lobbying over seven years, from 2011 to 2018 — finding that the fossil fuel industry vastly outnumbered other resource sectors, including the forestry and renewable energy industries — and analyzed how lobbying activities changed with prime ministers.

The result, the report found, is lobbying that’s increasingly focused on “deep state” connections, rather than elected officials, meaning the power of the fossil fuel industry lasts far beyond a federal election, regardless of voter appetite for climate action.

What that means, according to Nicolas Graham, a sociologist at the University of Victoria and lead author on the report, is there’s evidence of a sort of “elite policy network,” of long-lasting connections between high-powered and well-connected lobbyists and bureaucrats, “one that outlasts election cycles and develops over time.”

Proponents of the fossil fuel industry, like Alberta premier Jason Kenney, have long made a point of accusing environmental groups of being behind a “campaign of lies and defamation” against the province’s energy industry. 

When it comes to lobbying, the report found that the fossil fuel industry reported far more lobbying of the federal government than did environmental non-governmental organizations —  five times more.

“This idea that there’s a really, really well funded — disproportionately funded — environmental campaign defies the facts of a [fossil fuel] industry that is extremely well funded and very active politically,” Graham told The Narwhal.

Top fossil fuel lobbying organizations. Source: Corporate Mapping Project

‘Co-writing of policy’

Elected officials were the most-lobbied group when Prime Minister Stephen Harper was in office, according to the report. That started to change in 2015, when Justin Trudeau was elected prime minister. Then, the focus of fossil-fuel lobbyists shifted — to bureaucrats.

The report, “Big Oil’s Political Reach: Mapping fossil fuel lobbying from Harper to Trudeau,”  dubs this a shift to “deep state” lobbying, “whereby key government institutions and actors become integrated with private firms and interest groups that together co-produce regulation and policy.”

“It becomes this kind of a fusion of private interest and public bodies.” — Nicolas Graham

The result, Graham said, could suggest a kind of “co-governance and co-writing of policy,” in which industry groups take on an increasingly important role in influencing policy.

“It becomes this kind of a fusion of private interest and public bodies,” he added

Elected officials, Graham said, could be “seen as potentially not as amenable to influence from the oil and gas sector.” A strategic approach for the industry could be to integrate more deeply in government, lobbying bureaucrats rather than elected officials.

The report finds a network of well-connected senior public servants and mid-level staff who are in frequent contact with industry lobbyists.

Among the top 10 senior federal bureaucrats identified by the Corporate Mapping Project — each of whom remained in their positions after the 2015 election — the number of annual contacts with fossil fuel industry lobbyists increased from an average of around 145 contacts per year under the Harper government, to approximately 229 per year under the Trudeau government — nearly one contact per work day.

Pierre Gratton, president and CEO of the Mining Association of Canada, doesn’t think that’s newsworthy. “Anyone who does government relations knows that you work at all levels,” Gratton told The Narwhal.

“If you’re leaving it to parliament, you’re going to be disappointed in your outcome. Because the public service is the body that generates the ideas that cabinet and ultimately parliament end up deliberating upon,” he added.

“They’re often looking to us for ideas of how certain policies can work effectively.”

Gratton is also not surprised that there would be an increase in lobbying under the Liberals. “There would be a very simple explanation for that, I think — the Liberals’ approach to public policy was far more open than it was under Harper,” he said.

“Under the Liberals, I think probably everybody increased their amount of lobbying, particularly with public service. But that’s because the Liberals fundamentally changed how public policy was developed.” The Liberals, Gratton said, took public officials “off the leash” and made them more accessible to all groups.

But Graham is concerned that increased lobbying of non-elected officials could mean that lobbying efforts can far outlast election cycles and that electing new politicians may not be enough for voters to cast aside deep relationships between industry and government — something the report calls “the close coupling of federal policy to the needs of extractive corporations.”

“For people who voted in the federal election for some kind of increased action on climate change, I think it would be potentially eye-opening to think about the way policy is formed,” Graham said.

Six lobbying contacts per day

The reports finds the fossil fuel industry reported 11,452 lobbying contacts with government officials over a seven-year period — more than six contacts per work day.

A full quarter of those stem from two major industry associations: the Mining Association of Canada (MAC) — which represents a variety of mining interests, including four companies with interests in Alberta’s oilsands — and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP). 

CAPP declined The Narwhal’s request for an interview about its lobbying activity, but sent a statement by email. 

“It is not surprising CAPP is among the most active lobbyists in our sector,” Jay Averill, a spokesperson for CAPP, wrote in an email. “In effect, we are the main representative for Canada’s oil and natural gas industry.”

Federal institutions lobbied between 2011 and 2018. Source: Corporate Mapping Project

“It is our job to work with local, provincial and federal governments to find the best way to encourage investment in our industry while upholding the high social and environmental standards Canadians expect,” he added, noting that the industry contributes $8 billion in annual revenues to all levels of government.

“Our oil and natural gas industry benefits all Canadians and CAPP will continue to work with the federal government on making those benefits even greater.”

Gratton, of the Mining Association of Canada, rejects the notion that his organization represents the interests of the fossil fuel industry, saying his group advocates on a narrower subset of issues and was the first industry association that came out in favour of a carbon price.

Gratton told The Narwhal that one of the reasons his organization is top of the list in lobbying activities could be because it is diligent in reporting. 

“We report everything. We’re very careful about living up to the intent and spirit of the act,” he said.

 “I have trouble believing we are much more active than other industry groups active in Ottawa,” he added, pointing to a “grey area” in when meetings with public officials are reported. 

The Corporate Mapping Project report points to numerous flaws in Canada’s lobbying rules — vague information about what was actually discussed at lobbying meetings, lack of names of lobbyists present, imprecise dates, no disclosure of fees paid to lobbyists.

“There are fairly straightforward ways transparency could be improved,” Graham said.

Lobbying windows

Lobbying efforts increase in what are known as “lobbying windows,” according to the report.

One such lobbying window was during debate leading up to changes to Canada’s environmental assessment process under the Harper government. The report found that — of the years included in the report’s analysis — the year between November 2011 and November 2012 was the highest recorded year of lobbying from the sector.

The report’s findings on lobbying windows are in line with a previous investigation by The Narwhal, which found that 80 per cent of Senate lobbying over Bill C-69 — the act to reform Canada’s environmental assessment process, that passed in June —  stemmed from industry and related groups, primarily from the oil and gas industry.

The Corporate Mapping Project report found just 10 fossil fuel industry lobbying contacts with the Senate in 2016-2017. The Narwhal found the oil and gas industry met with individual Senate members 224 times over a 16-month period beginning when Bill-C-69 was first introduced in February 2018.

“In 2018–19 big carbon saw an opportunity to block mild reforms to environmental assessment and its Senate lobbying went into overdrive,” the report notes.

As The Narwhal reported in June, CAPP had described, in its lobbyist registration, one of the topics it planned to address a “grassroots lobbying campaign to ask Senators to make sure [Bill C-69] does not pass as it stands today.”

Leaders of major energy companies have acknowledged increasing their lobbying efforts during times like these in the past.

Speaking to CBC in June, Cenovus CEO Alex Pourbaix noted that the industry had ramped up activities to “an almost unprecedented effort with government,” in order to come up with what he had hoped would be “a workable bill.”

Not all industry groups opposed the bill. The Mining Association of Canada has supported Bill C-69 since it was introduced, telling CBC in June that it would provide more certainty and was an improvement over existing legislation. 

Public interest?

Graham is quick to point out that not all lobbying is negative, and that it can play a legitimate role in advancing the public interest. What’s missing, he said, is an equalization of influence, or “equalizing access” to politicians and bureaucrats.

The report documents a “core of a small world of leading industry associations and targeted offices and individuals within government that are in regular contact with each other” — just 20 organizations accounted for 88 per cent of the total lobbying contacts by the fossil fuel industry, according to the report.

“Policies that would proactively support more equal access to political influence are needed to ensure industry is not over-represented when shaping policy,” the report notes.

Gratton of the Mining Association isn’t concerned about the state of lobbying activities in Canada, saying critics may be presenting “a sensationalized view that’s really not really a truly representative accounting of how things function.”

“Canada’s [lobbying] is very different from lobbying in the United States,” he said. “It doesn’t happen in darkened corridors.”

Gratton views Canada’s lobbying rules as robust, and says he supports multi-stakeholder engagement. “I’ll be honest, in this age of sort of populism and Trumpism, I worry that that unique Canadian way of doing things is under threat,” he told The Narwhal.

“I would hate to see a day when in the public policy is developed differently than it has been traditionally in Canada,” he said. “It’s a better way of doing things that’s better for the country.”

But Graham told The Narwhal that he’s concerned about the ways in which corporations can influence public policy in Canada.

“The economic power of industry ends up reaching into political society,” he said.

And without equal access to influence political decisions, the report warns that meaningful action to reduce fossil fuel consumption may be that much more difficult.

“In this time of climate crisis, transitioning away from fossil fuels in a rapid, democratic and socially just manner is essential,” William Carroll, a co-author of the study said in a press release. 

“If we do not acknowledge and address the influence that the fossil fuel industry holds over government policy, we will not be able to take the steps necessary to adequately address the crisis with the urgency it requires.”

*Updated at 2:08 p.m. on Nov. 5, 2019, to clarify that in 2016/2017, there were 10 fossil fuel industry lobbying contacts with the Senate, not in total.

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On a typical day in the sprawling Municipal District of Greenview No. 16, drilling rigs hum in the forest, pickup trucks slosh through muddy access roads and hydraulic fracturing shakes deep underground shale formations.

In the meantime, the municipal district spends tens of millions of dollars it receives in tax payments from oil and gas companies on projects across the region, making the district’s reliance on a single sector as strong as ever. 

Infrastructure just outside Fox Creek, Alta. “The only reason we exist is to service the oil and gas industry,” the mayor of Fox Creek, Jim Hailes, told The Narwhal. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

In communities so deeply entrenched in oil and gas economies, the industry is not only a source of revenue, but of identity.

In 2018, the district — a large area of northwestern Alberta notable for its large swaths of trees and Crown land — received 58 payments in taxes and fees, totalling more than $77 million ($58.3 million USD) from oil and gas companies, according to data published under the Extractive Sector Transparency Measures Act (ESTMA), which came into force in Canada in 2015.

The Municipal District of Greenview is located within both the Montney and Duvernay shale plays, formations rich in natural gas. Map: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

Under the act, companies in the extractive sector must report payments made to all governments in Canada and across the world — a measure meant to “increase transparency and deter corruption.”

According to the 2018 data, the Municipal District of Greenview received more money in payments from oil and gas companies than any other county or municipal district in the province.

Just 5,583 people call the Municipal District of Greenview home (this includes only rural residents of the district, not people in the towns, which are governed separately), meaning per-capita payments from oil and gas companies equalled roughly $14,000 in 2018. This per-capita amount is approximately twice that of the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, home to the oilsands — although Wood Buffalo (a different type of municipality that includes the city of Fort McMurray) received higher tax payments overall.

With figures like that, it’s not particularly surprising that support for the industry here isn’t waning, even as there are increasing calls around the world to decrease reliance on fossil fuels.

Last year, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres made headlines when he said the world is facing “a direct existential threat.”  

“We need to rapidly shift away from our dependence on fossil fuels,” Guterres said, to prevent “runaway climate change.”

That sort of urgency isn’t felt by local officials in Greenview, where a fracking boom has brought much wealth to the region.

The Narwhal visited two of the largest communities in the region this summer to learn more about how the municipal district spends its oil and gas revenues, and what local officials envision for the future.

‘Only reason we exist’

Dale Smith, the reeve of the municipal district, said the importance of oil and gas is “huge” in the area. “If we didn’t have oil and gas, and with the small farming base that we have …” he begins, trailing off as he thought about the implications.

Reeve Dale Smith in Valleyview, Alta., on July 24, 2018. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

Vern Lymburner, the mayor of Valleyview — one of the larger towns in the district — finishes his thought for him. “These communities wouldn’t be here,” he said.

“Basically the reason these towns are here is because of oil and gas,” Lymburner told The Narwhal.

Mayor Vern Lymburner in Valleyview, Alta. Lymburner says the energy industry is the primary economic driver in the region, alongside some agriculture. “Basically the reason these towns are here is because of oil and gas,” he told The Narwhal. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

Jim Hailes, a retired schoolteacher and the mayor of Fox Creek, echoed that sentiment when The Narwhal visited him later at his town office. “The only reason we exist is to service the oil and gas industry,” he said. “[The town] was artificially created 50 years ago.” 

Mayor Jim Hailes in Fox Creek, Alta. “I’ve lived in Fox Creek for about 45 years,” Hailes told The Narwhal. “It’s a roller coaster.” Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

The area surrounding Valleyview has a small amount of farming and forestry activity, but for both towns, oil and gas has long been the lifeblood of the economy. 

“There are lots of different issues with regard to heavy reliance on a single sector,” John Parkins, a professor and department chair of resource economics and environmental sociology at the University of Alberta, told The Narwhal.  

“One of the things we look at when a community is heavily reliant on a single sector is the potential for boom and bust economic conditions to really affect the fortunes and the sustainability of that community.” 

Smaller communities, he said, often “lack the capacity” to absorb the shock of a big bust.

The Narwhal met with locals officials in the towns of Valleyview and Fox Creek — both geographically within the Municipal District of Greenview, though governed by town councils — to learn more about where exactly the millions in oil and gas revenues goes and how much the communities within the municipal district have come to rely on revenue from oil and gas companies.  

‘Very, very, very, very, very generous’

The district collects revenue from oil and gas companies through taxes such as property taxes and taxes on machinery and equipment. According to Smith, the reeve, this revenue makes up “somewhere between, say, 95 and 97 per cent” of the district’s total revenue.

According to the district’s financial statements, total expenses for 2018 were $89,868,181, meaning that the millions received from oil and gas companies are indeed a huge share of the money spent in the region — the $77 million the municipal district received in taxes and fees from oil and gas companies would make up more than 85 per cent of the district’s total expenses.

It’s clear oil and gas companies are paying far, far more money into local coffers than residents or other businesses.

Infrastructure from the oil and gas industry just outside Fox Creek, Alta. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

The district uses that money for its own operational costs — like the maintenance of oil-and-gas service roads — and also shares it with surrounding towns through arrangements such as cost-sharing agreements.

“That money has allowed us to do projects we never would have had the ability to do,” Lymburner, the mayor of Valleyview, told The Narwhal.

In communities deeply entwined with the oil and gas industry, these payments are received with gratitude — and a deep appreciation not only of the enormous additions to local coffers, but to what is perceived as a generous and supportive industry.

“The [district] has been very, very, very, very, very generous,” Hailes, the mayor of Fox Creek, another small community south of Valleyview, told The Narwhal of the way oil and gas money is distributed.

“In a roundabout way,” Hailes said, “[oil companies] contribute to everything.”

Oil, Lymburner said, “has made us what we are.” Smith agrees. “Oil is ingrained in our society,” he said. 

They don’t see that changing dramatically anytime soon.

Trillions of cubic metres of marketable gas

Greenview is the third-largest municipal district in the province, covering an area of 32,989 square kilometres — larger than Belgium. 

Outside of the towns — which have a combined population of approximately 3,800 people, according to 2016 census data — there are roughly 5,500 people living in the area. “This means there are over 6 square kilometres of land for every resident!” the district’s Facebook page boasts. Much of that land is used for industry — forestry or oil and gas.

A boom of activity, especially since the advent of directional drilling, in the Duvernay and Montney shale formations — large swaths of both of which are within the Municipal District of Greenview — has meant huge returns for the sparsely populated district.

The Duvernay formation has been a big deal in Alberta in recent years, not unlike the Bakken formation in North Dakota. The Duvernay lies under 130,000 square kilometres of the province — 20 per cent of Alberta’s total area. It’s been there for some 380 million years, formed during the Upper Devonian period when much of western Canada was under an inland sea.

Shale oil and shale gas are trapped deep within formations of shale — a form of sedimentary rock composed of compressed silt, clay and minerals. Trapped within the shale are deposits of oil and gas, often thousands of feet deep, that require what’s known as unconventional drilling — such as hydraulic fracturing — to access. Hydraulic fracturing involves sending water mixed with chemicals down into shale formations at high pressures to create cracks and allow trapped oil or gas to flow freely. Shale resources have become increasingly common in the global energy supply.

The National Energy Board estimates the Duvernay shale formation can produce a total of 542 million cubic metres of marketable crude oil, 2.17 trillion cubic metres of marketable gas and 995 million cubic metres of marketable natural gas liquids. 

It is, as Alberta’s Energy Regulator put it in a 2016 report, “emerging as Alberta’s foremost unconventional shale resource.”

Jeff Rubin, former chief economist with CIBC World Markets, told The Narwhal that this potential means the region is better poised for future economic growth than Alberta’s oilsands.

“There’s a lot stronger world demand for that resource than there is for Alberta bitumen,” he said, pointing to increasing world demand for shale gas.

“Decarbonization, if that occurs — and by that we mean stabilization and ultimate reduction of carbon emissions — involves the large-scale substitution of shale gas for coal,” Rubin told The Narwhal. Rubin noted that he believes the production and profitability of liquefied natural gas in the area would be heavily dependent on pipeline access, such as the Coastal GasLink pipeline in B.C.

But even an increasing popularity of shale gas worldwide doesn’t buffer the region from downturns, Rubin cautions.

“Any dependence of that nature on a resource base — oil, copper, nickel, whatever — comes with it the cyclical nature of the business cycle,” he said. 

“Boom and bust: that’s true of any commodity market.”

A campground where workers live year round in Fox Creek, Alta. Economist Jeff Rubin says that while the region is better poised for future growth than the oilsands, it still needs to be prepared for ups and downs. “Boom and bust: that’s true of any commodity market,” he said. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

Fracking concerns include contamination of fresh water, earthquakes 

Accessing the riches beneath the surface isn’t without consequences.

Hydraulic fracturing uses large amounts of fresh water — water that is injected deep into the ground in the place of the oil or gas that is being drilled, where most of it will remain forever.

Then there are the earthquakes. A study published in the journal Science last year noted “a sharp increase in the frequency of earthquakes near Fox Creek, Alta., began in December 2013 in response to hydraulic fracturing.”

Concerns have also been raised in recent years about the implications of methane — a potent greenhouse gas commonly leaked or intentionally flared in natural gas production. A study published earlier this year in the journal Biogeosciences posited that methane from shale gas — often accessed through hydraulic fracturing — may have bigger implications for the climate than previously thought.

“Shale-gas production in North America over the past decade may have contributed more than half of all of the increased emissions from fossil fuels globally and approximately one-third of the total increased emissions from all sources globally over the past decade,” the authors of the study wrote. 

But this hasn’t slowed down drilling in the area. 

Part of the importance of the Duvernay lies in its richness in natural gas liquids, including condensate — a liquid that can be combined with bitumen from the oilsands to ease transport through pipelines. 

“Shale is by no means an environmentally benign process,” Rubin said. But local officials see an industry striving to make improvements in its footprint and view any consequences as outweighed by the economic benefits for the region.

Multiplex bonanza

It’s clear that oil and gas money has built much of these towns.

Lymburner takes us on a tour of the Greenview regional multiplex — an obvious feather in his cap as mayor of Valleyview.

The Greenview Multiplex in Valleyview, Alta. The Municipal District of Greenview paid 83 per cent of the costs to build the facility, thanks in large part to tax payments paid by oil and gas companies. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

A farmer donated the land where the massive building now sits, just on the periphery of the town. The district paid for 83 per cent of it, as well as 80 per cent of the operating costs — thanks in large part to revenue from oil and gas companies.

From the foyer, we can see the pool, the waterslide and the lazy river. There’s a full gym upstairs, as well as dance studios, party rooms and racquetball courts. The receptionist tells us between 250 and 300 people visit per day. 

The Greenview Multiplex in Valleyview, Alta. The facility includes a pool, a lazy river, a full-service gym, dance studios and racquetball courts. “It’s hard to believe,” Mayor Lymburner said of the facility in a town of fewer than 2,000 people. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

Lymburner looks around, obviously proud. “A town of 2,000 people has this,” he says. 

“It’s hard to believe.”

We also hear about new Stars Air Ambulance landing pads, a new medical clinic, new playgrounds, money for the seniors’ centre, money for the school — the list goes on. 

In Fox Creek, the local peace officer was waiting for a shipment of kids’ bicycle helmets to arrive — he’d be handing them out for free to kids riding without one. They were paid for by Shell.

“The oil and gas people are so generous it’s ridiculous,” Hailes said when we visited him in Fox Creek. “The school doesn’t know what to do with it all.”

Mayor Jim Hailes in the new multiplex in Fox Creek, Alta. “The [district] has been very, very, very, very, very generous,” Hailes told The Narwhal of the way oil and gas money is distributed. The Municipal District, which receives large tax payments from oil and gas companies, was a large contributor to the building of his town’s multiplex. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

According to a 2018 report from the Parkland Institute, the Big Five together brought in $46.6 billion in aggregate profits in 2017 — roughly equivalent to the total income of the Alberta government that same year.

When Hailes takes us on a tour of his town’s new multiplex — our second such tour in one day in the district — he’s proud of the arrangements created with oil and gas companies. 

In exchange for having their names emblazoned on parts of the multiplex — the bleachers, the pool, the centre of the basketball court — the companies will pay maintenance costs for part of the facility. Otherwise, such big upkeep expenses could spell trouble for such a small town.

The Fox Creek Greenview Multiplex in Fox Creek, Alta. In exchange for having their names emblazoned on parts of the multiplex energy companies will pay maintenance costs for part of the facility. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

Parkins, the sociologist, points out that it’s important for communities to think long term when they decide where to spend their money. 

“Is it actually a good thing that the local oil and gas industry pumps tons of money into the recreation centre and pays for the local school or the local sports teams to buy jerseys and whatnot?” he wonders. 

“Or would it be more effective for the municipality to use those funds to promote economic diversification through initiatives like entrepreneurship training — small business development, incubating small businesses, providing training for people who want to foster new growth within the region?”

The Fox Creek Greenview Multiplex in Fox Creek, Alta. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

Anticipating the future

Parkins points to Pincher Creek as an example of a town that saw the “writing on the wall.” 

Twenty years ago, the region was heavily reliant on a local gas plant they knew wouldn’t last forever, he said. The community made a big push for wind power, which is now a huge industry in the area. In 1993, one of the first commercial wind farms was built on Cowley Ridge in the Pincher Creek region.

“Communities in Alberta are looking at the future and trying to anticipate what the future of the resource is going to be,” Parkins said. 

Parkins points to towns like Fernie or Lacombe that have re-invented themselves in recent years, having transitioned to more diverse economies less reliant on a single resource sector — creating new jobs for residents in the process.

“It might take a lot longer for places like Fox Creek to make that kind of transition,” he said, citing the difficulties of being further away from major population centres or tourist destinations.

Oilfield rentals in Fox Creek, Alta. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

‘Don’t want to be a one-horse town’

Smith, Lymburner and Hailes all feel the importance of the success of the oil and gas industry viscerally — all three have adult children working in it.

I asked the local officials whether they’re concerned so much of the district’s revenue relies on oil and gas revenue, with a relatively small tax base. “I think we’re probably always concerned, Lymburner said. “You don’t want to be a one-horse town.”

Mayor Vern Lymburner in Valleyview, Alta. Lymburner told The Narwhal the region is using money from oil and gas companies to try “to create economic development.” He says facilities like the multiplex help keep people in the town. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

Smith agrees, and said that’s part of the boon of receiving revenue from oil and gas — to try to create some stability outside of the industry. “We’re trying to create economic development,” he said.

Town planning documents, noting that the oil and gas industry “may be affected by global economic forces and environmental concerns,” also contain diversification goals and point to a future in which the Valleyview area may “diversify towards renewables, drawing on closely related existing expertise.” The documents also highlight the importance of other industries in the area: agriculture, forestry and sand and gravel extraction.

“It’s a major focus for us, so that it’s not strictly oil and gas, or so we can funnel some of this money into creating other opportunities,” Smith said.

Hailes, the mayor in Fox Creek, put it another way. 

“I’ve lived in Fox Creek for about 45 years,” he said. “It’s a roller coaster.”

When times are tough, the mentality, he said, is “please God give me another oil boom and I promise not to piss it away again.” He chuckles. That’s not the best way to go about it, he implies with a grin.

Parkins points out the difficulties of diversifying.

“One of the concerns about single-industry towns is that they tend to be over-adapted to a single industry, so the entire workforce and the entire human resources that exist there, are oriented or adapted to a single industry,” Parkins told The Narwhal.

“As a result, it’s quite challenging for the human capital — the people who live and work in those communities — to transition to other sectors because of the kinds of skill sets that are adapted to, in this case, oil and gas, that are not necessarily transferable to another sector.”

A pick-up truck parked outside a restaurant in Fox Creek, Alta. In communities deeply entrenched in oil and gas economies, the industry is not only a source of revenue, but of identity. “Oil is ingrained in our society,” the reeve of the district told The Narwhal. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

Local officials acknowledge the difficulties, too.

“It’s a huge industry for Alberta. It’s never going to last forever, there’s only so much of it there. So yeah, at some point in time, you gotta have a plan,” Smith said.

Part of the plan is to make the towns more attractive to potential residents, to build a stable community in case the future isn’t always so flush with cash.

“This enhances your ability to bring people to your community,” Lymburner said. “It helps you get doctors, it helps you to retain people.”

People working out on a rainy day in the Greenview Multiplex in Valleyview, Alta. “This enhances your ability to bring people to your community,” Lymburner said. “It helps you get doctors, it helps you to retain people.” Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

Unpaid bills

The revenue doesn’t come without drawbacks, though the enthusiastic support of the industry makes them more than palatable to the officials we spoke with.

In recent months, communities across the province have started to voice complaints about failing to receive money they’re owed from oil and gas companies. 

The district’s financial statements acknowledge the risk of not being able to collect taxes. “Greenview is exposed to the credit risk associated with fluctuations in the oil and gas industry,” the statement reads. “A significant portion of the property taxes outstanding … are receivable from companies in the oil and gas industry.”

In July, for example, the Greenview council heard that Seven Generations Energy Ltd., a natural gas producer, had requested that the district reverse finance charges of $120,178.27 owed. Another Calgary-headquartered company, AlphaBow, owed $131,739.07 in outstanding taxes.

“It’s not a perfect world,” Smith said. “Smaller gas companies are struggling to pay their bills.” 

But overall, Smith said, the district has not had huge issues with companies struggling to pay. 

Oil and gas infrastructure just outside Fox Creek, Alta. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

Where the concerns lie are more far-off, and more abstract: what will the community look like in 10 or 20 years? Can it sustain a major bust?

“These are really intractable challenges,” Parkins said. “When we look at more remote communities where their options are more limited, it’s not easy to see a path towards economic diversification.” 

“But it’s possible to move the needle a bit, and to anticipate and be reflective about the future and anticipate that fracking is not going to be here forever.”

There are signs of promising economic diversification on the horizon. In August, Alberta’s first commercial scale geothermal facility was announced for a location just south of Grande Prairie. The Greenview Geothermal Power Project will produce enough electricity to power 6,800 homes. Drilling and construction partner PCL Construction says the project will create 1,000 jobs.

“We know how to drill in this province, and we know how to build effective, large-scale power facilities. We have world-leading expertise in those areas, because oil has played such a huge part in our economy for so long, and we need that same expertise to create geothermal wells,” Sean Collins, president of project leader Terrapin Geothermics, said. “Projects like this are diversifying from our strengths, and Canada’s strength lies in our energy sector.”

A net-zero town office

The town of Valleyview has another new building to show off to visitors: its town office. Compared to its predecessor — a small, one-storey, nondescript brick building with weathered red awnings and crumbling concrete steps — the new building is extremely modern, and much bigger.

The Town of Valleyview’s new “net-zero” office. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

It’s a big deal in Valleyview, and not only for its design caché. The town decided to build a net-zero building — the first commercial building of its specifications in the world.

The new building features passive-building designs and produces its own electricity. It has 78 solar panels installed on its roof, and just opened last year.

I asked Lymburner why the town decided to go ahead with a net-zero building. 

His answer was simple. 

“It’s the future.”

In the municipal district of Greenview, that kind of future feels both far off and, at times, just around the corner.

This article is part of a collaboration between The Narwhal, the Corporate Mapping Project, Publish What You Pay Canada and the Natural Resource Governance Institute. The Corporate Mapping Project is jointly led by the University of Victoria, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and Parkland Institute. This research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Update Monday, September 23: This article was updated to reflect that Jeff Rubin is no longer a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation.

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Every day, we’re assailed with dozens of facts and figures about energy issues in Canada: how many jobs or royalties will come from a new pipeline, the annual growth rate of renewables, our per-person energy consumption.

But it’s often tricky to decipher truth from fiction.

That’s where the new 176-page encyclopedic report by veteran earth scientist and expert in coal and unconventional fuels David Hughes is meant to come in.

“Hopefully what it does is it provides the foundation of facts,” Hughes said in an interview with DeSmog Canada. “There’s a lot of rhetoric when it comes to energy. I wanted to make that quantitative so we actually had that bottom line of facts, rather than conjecture. I’m not trying to be prescriptive. I don’t have a magic answer. But I think we need to start with the facts.”

Over the course of 132 graphs and another 34 tables, Hughes — who worked for the Geological Survey of Canada for more than three decades as a scientist and research manager — meticulously chronicles and illustrates close to every imaginable part of Canada’s energy system.

There are four components to the report: 1) Canada’s actual energy production and consumption compared to the rest of the world, broken down into all the different sources; 2) the supplies and money from fossil fuel production; 3) electricity sources and trends; 4) emissions trajectories and targets.

Sounds like a few metric tonnes of info, right?

Well, while we highly recommend perusing through the report in its entirety, we’ve broken down some the 10 most noteworthy facts Hughes highlights in the report.

1. Canada uses a massive amount of energy

It might not come as a surprise to many, but Canada uses a lot of energy: more than five times the world’s average on a per-capita basis.

Hydroelectricity makes up a bigger proportion of our energy mix than other countries, but we have the exact average of dependence on oil and gas as everyone else.

When it comes to natural gas — used for heating and electricity generation — Canada uses 5.8 times the global average.

On the bright side, Canada’s coal consumption has been on the steady decline since the phase-out in Ontario. We’re already using half as much on a per-capita basis as the United States — and that trend will continue as Alberta shuts down its 18 coal-fired power plants in the coming years, with massive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution.

2. There’s an incredible amount of hydro power in this country

Canada is the second largest hydropower producer in the world, trailing only China with its colossal Three Gorges Dam.

On a per-capita basis, Canada harnesses 20 times the power from dams as the global average — only beat out by Norway, which somehow generates 51 times the per-capita average (you’ll start to notice that Scandinavia excels at a lot of these things).

Plenty of forecasts of low-carbon futures predict that Canada will have to add a lot more hydro to the grid in the coming decades. But Hughes isn’t convinced, based on recent precedent.

“I don’t think there’s any way we’re going to build all those Site C sized dams and nuclear reactors [modelled in various reports],” he said. “Economics, ecology and public protest would be off the rails.”

3. But we kind of suck at non-hydro renewables

Unfortunately, that dam-building habit has meant Canada isn’t nearly as good at non-hydro renewables: sources like solar, wind, geothermal and biomass.

Compared to Denmark (23.7 per cent of energy from non-hydro renewables), Portugal (15.5 per cent) and Germany (12.7 per cent), Canada only generated a tiny 3.1 per cent of its energy from such sources in 2016.

That’s slightly below the world average.

This is expected to change in the coming years as provinces and territories shift towards renewables.

4. Industry uses most of the energy in Canada

While we’ve been talking about per-capita consumption, it’s not really that accurate because 51 per cent of Canada’s energy is used by industry for things like oil and gas, refining, mining, pulp and paper and chemicals. Another 23 per cent is used in transportation: freight trucks, passenger cars, airplanes.

That leaves only 14 per cent for residential and 12 per cent for commercial. In other words, it’s the big factories, mines and refineries that are using most of our energy — yet they’re often the same entities which receive exemptions or subsidies for emissions.

Given the industrial sector’s large dependence on fossil fuels to make or extract stuff, this has meant that Canada has an extremely high amount of energy required per dollar of GDP — higher than even China.

While Canada’s GDP is being slowly “decoupled” from emissions, we’re still a long ways from the lower carbon likes of Denmark or the UK.

5. Western Canada is littered with an unbelievable number of old wells

Most people will understandably picture the oilsands when they think about the Canadian oil industry. But the massive growth in extracting bitumen from Alberta’s northern boreal forest is actually a fairly new phenomenon, really kicking off around 2007.

Up until that point, conventional oil — the stuff you drill for in wells — had reigned. But production from that method peaked in 1973. That’s meant that steadily rising production has required more and more wells, as declining well productivity means that companies have to keep finding and drilling more.

“With conventional oil and gas, you’ve just got to keep drilling and pouring capital into it all the time, otherwise it goes down,” Hughes said. “Companies always drill their best land first. You always got for the sweet spots, where the best economics are.”

It’s something made even more frantic with fracking. At last count, fracking now accounts for three-quarters of all oil production from wells in Western Canada. Such wells result in high initial production but decline at an even more rapid pace than conventionals — up to 83 per cent over three years.

As a result, Western Canada is just littered with wells: more than 820,000 in total, including gas, oil and bitumen. Only 235,000 are still active. A full 38 per cent of the wells are listed as inactive, with another 11 per cent as suspended. That means companies haven’t actually dealt with the environmental liabilities — which may cost billions to reclaim in the future.

6. The oilsands still produces some of the highest carbon oil in the world

Politicians and industry often brag about Alberta’s world-class environmental regulations and claim that’s a reason to justify more oilsands expansion.

But the unfortunate reality is that Alberta oilsands crude remains incredibly carbon-intensive, with Suncor’s Synthetic H blend emitting 297 per cent as much pollution as the best-performing oil in the world (in Kazakhstan) and 161 per cent as much as conventional oil in Saskatchewan. Many other oils around the world produce cleaner barrels: Iraq, Kuwait, Brazil, Russia, UK and Norway.

It’s an incredibly energy intensive process, with an energy return on energy investment of 4:1 for in-situ and 8:1 for mining, compared to 17:1 for average global oil.

7. Alberta is receiving astonishingly little return on its oil

Another resounding narrative is that Alberta needs pipelines and oilsands expansion in order to generate massive revenues for government coffers, allowing it to build schools, hospitals and roads. But Alberta is actually receiving decreasing revenues on a per-barrel basis.

Since 1980, oil and gas production in Alberta has doubled. But royalty revenues are down by 90 per cent from that level.

Currently, non-renewable resource revenue makes up a mere 3.3 per cent of the government’s income. The same has happened in B.C., with gas royalties collapsing as production skyrockets. Corporate income taxes from fossil fuel producers have also collapsed by 51 per cent since 2006.

“The concept of high-grading and selling the best of our resources off for declining revenues to governments and people who own the resource doesn’t seem to be very smart,” Hughes quipped.

8. Fossil fuel jobs are also surprisingly low

You’d never know it from listening to Premier Rachel Notley and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but long-term fossil fuel jobs have effectively flatlined since 2006. Meanwhile, construction jobs now constitute 52 per cent of all jobs in the sector — but they’re short-term jobs and usually evaporate as soon as a project is completed.

In total, employment in oil and gas extraction totals less than three per cent of total Canadian employment, and around 12 per cent of Alberta’s employment.

Hughes was also intentional not to include so-called “spin-off” jobs in his reporting.

“What the politicians do is say ‘we’ve got to count all of the store owners and money that these workers put into the economy,’ ” he explained. “That sort of assumes the store owners would otherwise be unemployed, which is not accurate. A lot of the jobs numbers that are quoted are huge numbers of spin-off jobs.”

In total, employment in oil and gas extraction totals less than three per cent of total Canadian employment, and around 12 per cent of Alberta’s employment. https://t.co/5uaACUKV81

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) May 1, 2018

9. Meeting climate targets is going to be nearly impossible with oilsands expansion

Thanks to rapidly rising oilsands emissions, scheduled to hit 115 megatonnes by 2030, it’s appearing unlikely that Canada will hit its Paris Agreement target. Currently, we’re overshooting the mark by a full 66 megatonnes — meaning costly emissions credits will have to be bought.

It’s going to get way harder heading towards 2050. By then, oil and gas emissions will require the remainder of the economy to contract by more than 100 per cent. That will require a tremendous amount of low-carbon electricity to pull off, costing anywhere between $30 billion and $70 billion per year from 2017 to 2050.

Hughes is seriously doubtful this will happen — and instead calls for finding efficiencies and reductions from existing systems.

“Investing in reducing consumption will be a very big deal,” he said.

“To me, we have to do as much of that as we can first before spending a lot of money trying to replace business as usual. I don’t think it’s possible. Fossil fuels are just too useful, energy dense and convenient. All of our infrastructure is built based on them. But I think there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit for reducing consumption.”

10. We need to rely on facts to guide us forward

Hughes spent years chipping away at this report, compiling decades worth of knowledge and sources into one place. He said he’s going to continue updating it now that he has a template.

For the rest of us, the mammoth work now exists as an excellent reference and fact-checking resource for when something a politician or industry exec says sounds a bit off.

“I just want to provide a solid factual basis to go forward,” he concluded. “I’m a grandfather. I have a concern for future generations. I’m a little put off by some of the rhetoric I see on TV. We need to start with the facts and go from there. ”

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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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Political donations made to the BC Liberals under the name of a prominent Teck Resources lobbyist were actually made by the company and were registered in error, according to the company.

A joint investigation between DeSmog Canada and University of Victoria researcher Nick Graham of the Corporate Mapping Project uncovered seven Teck Resources registered lobbyists who have also donated to the BC Liberals.

According to the Elections BC database, Carleigh Whitman, manager of government relations for Teck Resources, made personal contributions totaling $4,275 to the BC Liberals.

Political donations by lobbyists are in the spotlight after a Globe and Mail investigation revealed some lobbyists are being reimbursed for their contributions, a practice that is illegal in B.C., a province with some of the weakest political donation laws in the country.

Last week Elections BC launched an investigation into the matter and, after receiving additional complaints regarding personal donations, it has now referred the investigation to the RCMP.

When asked if Teck Resources reimbursed Whitman for her donation to the BC Liberals, Chris Stannell, senior communications specialist for Teck, said the contributions “were listed in error as being made by an individual.”

“They were donations made by Teck and paid using a Teck corporate credit card,” Stannell wrote to DeSmog Canada in an e-mail.

“Our practice is to report all such administrative errors and request a correction as soon as we are made aware of them,” he said.

Stannell said the company does not make donations through individuals.

The BC Liberals previously admitted “there has been confusion” about how donations from individuals are registered in the party’s system because some donations made on the behalf of a company or special interest are not categorized as such.

Donations made on the BC Liberal website through a personal credit card are automatically registered as a personal contribution, even though the donation may have been intended to be made on a corporation’s behalf.

A spokesperson for the BC Liberals did not respond to a request for comment.

In addition to Whitman, six other Teck Resources lobbyists have also made personal donations to the BC Liberals.

Mark Edwards (donations: $4,500)

James Fraser (donations: $1,186)

Mark Reder (donations: $3,465)

Marcia Smith (donations: $2,975)

Tom Syer (donations: $730)

Alexa Young (donations: $1,900)

Teck Resources declined to comment further on donations made by these six other individuals. The company also did not respond to questions regarding when Teck became aware of the donations being “listed in error” or when Teck reported such inaccuracies to the BC Liberals.

Teck Resources is the largest donor to the BC Liberals. Since 2008 Teck has donated $1,502,444 to the BC Liberals and $60,090 to the BC NDP. Since 2010, Norman Keevil, chair of the board for Teck, has personally donated $65,585 to the BC Liberals.

The company reported $8.3 billion in revenue in 2015 and operates five metallurgical mines in B.C. as well as an oilsands mine in Alberta.

Thirty Additional Fossil Fuel Lobbyists Contributed to BC Liberals

In total, 37 fossil fuel lobbyists from the 10 most prolific lobbying firms have donated to the BC Liberals since 2010.

Donations from these lobbyists total more than $116,000 with some individuals donating more than $11,000 through multiple small contributions.

The top 10 most active lobbying firms in the fossil fuel sector include the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, Chevron Canada, Enbridge, Encana, FortisBC, Spectra Energy, Teck Resources and TransCanada.

Several of the lobbyists work under the employment of government relations firms including National Public Relations and Earnscliffe. Both firms did not respond to requests for comment on their policy regarding reimbursement for political donations.

DeSmog Canada also reached out to several of the top donors for comment, but those requests went unanswered.

BC Liberal Political Donations from Top Fossil Fuel Lobbyists April 2010 – March 2017 by DeSmog Canada on Scribd

Image: Teck Resources via Facebook

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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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We’ve all seen a chart like it: logos of corporations connected by thin lines to other logos, linking dozens of subsidiaries to spin-offs of even larger companies.

But such diagrams — whether they attempt to illustrate the concentration of media ownership or linking music record companies to arms manufacturers — rarely involve Canada or the fossil fuel companies that dominate lobbying and other political efforts.

The Corporate Mapping Project, co-directed by Shannon Daub of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and William Carroll of the University of Victoria, aims to remedy that.

“We need to have a conversation about how these forms of concentrated power can be problematic for democratic processes in terms of decision-making and the citizenry collectively determining its future,” says Carroll, sociology professor at the University of Victoria.

“To the extent that you have very strong concentrations of corporate power in key sectors of the economy, it limits the boundaries of permissible discourse: what can be said, what can be discussed openly.”

Project Maps 238 Fossil Fuel Companies in Canada

The Corporate Mapping Project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, just concluded the first of its six years.

In that time, the project analyzed more than $50 million in corporate assets and “mapped” 238 Canadian corporations centred in the fossil fuel sector (which linked out to a total of 1,258 total corporations based in Canada and abroad).

Going far beyond simply connecting, say, Suncor and Syncrude, the project examines companies at the level of governance, tracking what Carroll dubs the “elite networks” of corporate executives and directors.

The project features another three strands that will be explored over the course of the next half-decade.

One will examine the reach of corporate influence into civil and political society, impacting and helping shape entities like think tanks, foundations, industry groups, lobby groups, universities and research institutes. A subsect of that will explore how corporations push certain discourses via advertising, corporate social responsibility reports and press releases.

Another will look at commodity chains, how power is organized within chains of production and the “flashpoints” of protest such as anti-Northern Gateway blockades and less place-specific movements such as fossil fuel divestment campaigns.

Corporate Connections to be Posted on Wiki Community

Rounding out the quartet will be the actual collection and transmitting of the learnings.

Carroll says an online interactive tool will be developed with a wiki community to keep it up to date, similar to how data is presented by the Public Accountability Initiative (a U.S. nonprofit that research connections between corporations and government).

There are a dozen or so co-investigators that form the core team for the Corporate Mapping Project. Partners include Unifor, the University of Alberta, Simon Fraser University, the University of Lethbridge and the University of Regina.

It’s a sizable project. As Carroll notes, such resources are much needed given the changing landscape of new provincial and federal governments, the collapse in the global price of oil and the recent Paris climate change agreement.

Then there’s the fierce debate over TransCanada’s Energy East pipeline, pitting Alberta’s NDP government against Indigenous communities, climate activists and the provinces of Québec and Ontario.

TransCanada used ‘Bullying’ and ‘Attempts to Buy People Out’

It’s a situation that well represents why the Corporate Mapping Project is so needed, and why its organizers are bringing Éric Pineault — sociology professor at Université du Québec à Montréal and author of the recently released "The Energy East Trap" — to Vancouver and Victoria for a series of free lectures titled “Extreme Oil: Corporate Power, Tar Sands Expansion, and the Capitalist Pressure to Extract.”

Pineault says TransCanada started its pitch for Energy East to local residents with “bullying and trying buy people out.”

Documents leaked to Greenpeace show TransCanada hired public relations giant Edelman to concoct a fake grassroots advocacy campaign designed to persuade the public to support Energy East. The scandal led TransCanada and Edelman to eventually part ways.

Since the federal Liberal government was elected, the company has entered a “seduction phase,” according to Pineault. But the underlying intentions of the company — which also owns the proposed Keystone XL pipeline — is the same: to increase shareholder value.

Such an ownership structure means the “progressive extractivism” agenda that suggests increased hydrocarbon production is required to fund the transition to a “greener economy” is almost doomed to fail.

“It ties you in and can co-opt…your transition.” He added, “I think [Alberta’s] Notley government is going in that direction.”

Private Ownership Makes Transition to Renewables Far More Difficult

Pineault argues that pipelines such as Energy East will likely be around for many decades and suck up investment, research efforts and competent workers that could otherwise be directed to renewable projects. In addition, efficiencies may be developed to “green” hydrocarbon production instead of cutting down on emissions from heating and transportation.

“If it was a publically controlled sector, then you could plan this phase-in, phase-out approach,” he says. “You can’t do that with private capital: they consider they’re sitting on assets that are worth billions and the value of these assets must be realized on a 60- or 70-year cycle.”

“They’re going to do everything they can to keep that cycle going as long as they can.”

Which is why it seems fairly important to know who’s calling the shots, what kind of tactics are being deployed and what entities are being potentially harnessed to promote a company’s agenda.

That’s where the Corporate Mapping Project comes in. After all, it’s pretty difficult to break those thin lines if you don’t even know they exist.

Tickets to Pineault’s free lectures are available online. RSVP details below:

Vancouver:

Wednesday May 18, 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM

SFU Harbour Centre (Hastings & Seymour)

Free but you need a ticket: http://www.ccpabc.ca/extreme_oil_van

Victoria:

Friday May 20, 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM

Legacy Gallery (630 Yates St)

Free but you need a ticket: http://www.ccpabc.ca/extreme_oil_victoria

Image: Suncor/Facebook

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.