He had no idea he was being taped.

So when influential Washington, DC, political consultant Richard Berman talked about strategy and tactics to the oil and gas industry’s Western Energy Alliance in Colorado Springs this past June, he didn’t mince words.  

“This is an endless war,” Berman said.

The secret tape was published in the New York Times a few weeks ago, released by a displeased oil industry executive, on condition of anonymity.

As he urged industry reps to employ tactics like digging up embarrassing tidbits about environmentalists and liberal celebrities, Berman also made one emphatic point:

“People always ask me one question all the time, ‘How do I know that I won't be found out as a supporter of what you're doing?’ We run all of this stuff through non-profit organizations that are insulated from having to disclose donors. There is total anonymity. People don't know who supports us. We've been doing this for 20-something years in this regard.”

The Western Energy Alliance, at whose June meeting Berman laid out his cold-blooded strategy, describes membership as “an investment in the future of the independent oil and gas community in the West.” Its members throughout the U.S. and Canada “share and support our commitment to improve business conditions, expand opportunities and move the industry forward.” 

The only government member of the 480-member Western Energy Alliance is the Canadian Consulate.

Deliberately Misleading the Public

What was Berman, chief executive of Berman & Company, doing talking to the Western Energy Alliance? He was there to raise $3 million from energy executives to pay for an advertising and PR campaign named “Big Green Radicals.”

Berman boasts of having more than 25 “non-profit” front groups that launder money from industry players of all sorts, including the fossil fuel sector, with no way for citizens to find out about this clandestine funding.

“I am religious about not allowing company names to ever get used … And I don't want companies to ever admit that because it does give the other side a way to diminish our message.”

Major corporations secretly financing such a campaign should not worry about offending the general public because “you can either win ugly or lose pretty,” he said.

That strategy sounds familiar back in Canada.

Here’s a deliberately misleading statement that would seem to come straight out of Berman’s manual: “For the fossil fuel industries, the battle with environmental activists is no longer David versus Goliath.”

But this wasn’t a statement from Berman — no, this is the final sentence of an article by Vancouver "researcher" Vivian Krause, who came out of the woodwork in the fall of 2009 when she first started writing a blog called Fair Questions, taking aim at the David Suzuki Foundation’s work on farmed salmon and the support it received from U.S. charitable foundations.

Fun fact: Krause is a nutritionist who worked doing PR for the farmed salmon industry. But it didn’t take long for her so-called “fair questions” to extend to many other environmental issues and organizations.

Instead of searching for a fair answer, Krause settled upon a conspiracy theory. It was to be a story she told over and over again — and it goes like this:

The corporate sector is beleaguered by rich environmental groups bolstered by money from U.S. charitable foundations with a hidden, self-interested agenda — not to do good in the world, or protect the environment, but to attack Canadian competition.

Krause wrote that U.S. foundations were funding work to “demarket” Canadian oil, so the U.S. can control the market. She attacked one of British Columbia's greatest conservation achievements, The Great Bear Rainforest agreement, as part of this conspiracy, calling the forest, "The Great Trade Barrier."

She pursued this theory with blinders on — ignoring all other money in the debate, ignoring all rational explanations for U.S. foundations funding work in Canada and ignoring organizations like Ethical Oil and British Columbians for Prosperity that tout Krause’s arguments but don’t disclose their own sources of funding.

Krause’s work is largely responsible for providing the federal government the ammunition it needed to earmark $13 million for the Canada Revenue Agency to conduct audits of charities’ “political activities.” Diverting the attention of environmental groups to decrease their effectiveness is another strategy out of Big Oil’s dirty PR playbook — as indicated in the Edelman documents outlining a strategy to do just that in the TransCanada Energy East pipeline debate.

Krause has maintained she’s working out of her North Vancouver basement apartment, driven by a sense of injustice to right a wrong. No one was paying her. In fact, she was living on her savings. It seemed an implausible story given the time she put into the work.  

Eventually, Vancouver businessperson and civic advocate Sandy Garossino managed to get Krause to admit on Twitter that more than 90 per cent of her income from 2012 onward has come from resource sector speaking fees.

But this hasn’t stopped her message being picked up verbatim by those who agree with it.

In July 2014, Krause’s work was published in the fossil fuel industry magazine, Alberta Oil, an updated version of the same-old-same-old story.

Her message — now also Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s message — is reinforced by other contributors in the issue of Alberta Oil. There’s Ezra Levant, the abrasive Sun Media host, and author of "Ethical Oil" who asserts: “Some organizations are on the payroll, like the Council of Canadians, that took $1.6 million from U.S. foundations to fight against fracking.”

The editor of Alberta Oil, Sebastian Gault, tells readers that Krause “uncovered an international sponsored scheme [he just about said “conspiracy,” didn’t he?] to stall energy development.”

He adds: “We now have a better understanding of the rise of Big Green and its influence over pseudo-grassroots organizations working against the resource sector.”

"Big Green?" Guess where that term comes from? Straight from Rick Berman, who vowed to wage a campaign he would call “Big Green Radicals."  

Embarrass them publicly, ridicule them, don't worry about playing fair or being honest, the goal is simple: win. That is Berman's message and Krause’s years of attacks on Canadian environmental groups seem to play from his book.

—

Editor’s Note:

We know that upon publishing this article, angry tweets and messages in the form of personal attacks will be aimed at damaging the credibility of DeSmog Canada. 

We know this will happen because this is what Krause and her followers do again and again, straight from the Berman script. This makes many journalists wary of challenging what Krause says and particularly intimidates those she directly attacks.

But DeSmog Canada exists to cut through the spin clouding the debate on important national issues such as natural resource development, the economy and democracy — and we wouldn’t be doing our job if we shied away from this topic. 

Next up: Digging Deeper into Vivian Krause's Disingenuous Anti-Environment Witch Hunt

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B.C.'s Christy Clark government is proposing to overhaul the Societies Act, and they've distributed a snoozer of a White Paper to let you know all about it.

If you've dozed off already, WAKE UP, because there's a massive zinger quietly planted deep inside. You can do something about it — more on that at the end of this post. But unmentioned in any preamble or executive summary, Section 99 allows any person (including corporations) to take any registered society to court that they believe is acting contrary to the public interest — whatever that is.

Here it is:

Complaints by public

99 (1) A person whom the court considers to be an appropriate person to make an application under this section may apply to the court for an order under this section on the grounds that a society

(b) is carrying on activities that are detrimental to the public interest.

In other words, environmental non-profit groups better watch their step because they're in the cross-hairs. Premier Clark is handing the legal hammer to Enbridge, Kinder Morgan, ExxonMobil, Koch, Encana, Chevron, Sinopec, Suncor and the entire B.C. LNG sector to tie non-profits up in court for years.

Section 99 looks like Clark's close advisor Gwyn Morgan drafted it up during half-time at last year's Grey Cup. Not a single competent lawyer within the Ministry of Justice could say with a straight face that it's constitutional. The clear intent is to silence and intimidate Canadian conservation and environmental non-profits with the threat of litigation. And if mere threat doesn't work, this legislation enables the corporate sector to bludgeon them into lawsuit bankruptcy.

This proposal is one of the most ill-conceived and draconian initiatives to see the light of day in a modern democracy, and reveals the extent of Clark's captivity by the oil and gas lobby. (And one more reason B.C. political leaders should be prevented from funding their election campaigns at the Petroleum Club in Calgary).

But as policy, it's also breathtakingly stupid. As if B.C. doesn't already have the mother of all court backlogs to cope with, the Clark government now proposes to fill up the system with disgruntled parents taking out their beefs in court against a minor hockey association or local elementary school parent advisory council. It will be open season on abortion clinics, LGBTQ organizations and mosques. Don't think for a minute that won't happen.

The real backdrop, of course, is that the Harper government has been on a tear against environmentalists for years, muzzling our scientists and attempting to discredit Canadian environmental NGOs.

The government has spent millions in fruitless CRA revenge audits hunting for a wholly imaginary conspiracy involving Canadian environmental organizations and U.S. scientific and charitable foundations. This vendetta has cost both the charitable sector and public purse untold funds in accounting and legal fees, over nothing.

Agree or disagree with the environmental movement, its members are entitled, as are all of us, to contribute vigorously to public debate over resource development. No one in a free and democratic society should be silenced or censored by fear of government-sanctioned reprisal. But that is precisely the purpose of this legislation.

Christy Clark would do well to remember that Canada is a free nation — our constitution says so. British Columbians, including non-profits, are free to do what we want, express ourselves freely and associate with whomever we choose to, unless it's for an unlawful purpose.

If government wants to limit that freedom it must abide by the Charter of Rights, not force citizens to meet a vague test like "public interest," which doesn't mean the same thing to any two people in the province. That would be the same Charter of Rights that Justice Susan Griffin pounded the B.C. government with during the teachers' dispute.

This White Paper is open to comments by the public until the end of day Wednesday Oct. 15. E-mail yours to the Financial and Corporate Sector Policy Branch here: fcsp@gov.bc.ca

Photo: Chris Yakimov.

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Last month’s PRISM revelations are a disconcerting reminder that even here in Canada, paranoid fantasies about mass government surveillance are more than a work of fiction. Listening to our phone calls, monitoring our Internet searches, reading our emails, trawling our social media accounts. These things are not only possible, but thanks to government fear mongering feeding our increased tolerance for supervision in a post-9/11 world, they’re also entirely legal.   In Canada, government data mining is administered by the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC)—a top-secret federal agency that reports directly to the Minister of Defence, employs over 2,000 people, and operates with an annual taxpayer-funded budget of nearly half-a-billion dollars.   Armed with enough raw computing power to process boundless amounts of information, this “NSA-North” is free to intercept and cultivate all metadata—essentially a record of who we know, and how well—coming through the country in order to map out our social networks, patterns of mobility, professional relationships, and even our personal interests.

“Security and police agencies have been increasingly conflating terrorism and extremism with peaceful citizens exercising their democratic rights to organise petitions, protest and question government policies,” said Dr. Jeffery Monaghan of the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen's University. “Canada is at very low risk from foreign terrorists but like the U.S. it has built a large security apparatus following 9/11. The resources and costs are wildly out of proportion to the risk.”

“[Domestic issue-based] extremism,” maintains Canada’s Counter-terrorism Strategy, “tends to be based on grievances—real or perceived—revolving around the promotion of various causes such as animal rights, white supremacy, environmentalism and anti-capitalism.”

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This is a guest post by Gerry Caplan, a Canadian academic, public policy analyst, commentator and political activist.

Soon after the 2011 election, with his majority government at last in hand, Prime Minister Harper decided that nothing, but nothing, was more important to Canada's entire future than a pipeline to carry oil from Alberta to the Pacific. This came as a shock to many Canadians, first because it hadn't been raised in the election, second because many believe that to combat global warming we must reduce, not expand, our reliance on fossil fuels.

In some countries, those who disagree with their government's policies are vilified, demonized, accused of being unpatriotic and operating under the influence of malign foreign influences. In Turkey, for example, Prime Minister Erdogan blames anti-government protests on terrorists and extremists supported by "foreign conspirators."

The same is true in Egypt, as Deepak Obhrai, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, informed the House just this week. An Egyptian court had convict 43 non-profit workers of illegally using foreign funds to foment unrest in the country and sentencing them up to five years in jail. This was unacceptable, Mr. Obhrai said.

"Civil society and international NGOs are legitimate actors in any democratic state. These individuals were working to support the transparency of the government that has been closed for too long. The targeting of civil society actors undermines the legitimacy of the judicial process and is a clear misuse of government power. Without legitimate institutions, a government cannot hope to maintain the confidence of its people. We continue to call on Egypt to work with their citizens to build a stronger and more democratic Egypt."

But this is deeply democratic Canada, of course. So here is how Harperland dealt with civil society and international NGOs who opposed a pipeline from the oil sands to the Pacific. 

In January 2012, natural resources minister Joe Oliver published an article in the Financial Post harshly attacking "environmentalists and other radical groups [who] threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda." Their agenda was obvious, he said: killing projects on which the country's future depended. And their goal was simple: "to undermine Canada's national economic interest."

In other words, these Canadians disagreed with the Harper government about Enbridge's proposed Northern Gateway pipeline.

Suddenly, a great crusade against ostensible eco-fanatics was on. Government members, a good chunk of the media and the entire united oil industry began treating simple citizens and legitimate NGOs as disloyal insurrectionists. In the words of former Enbridge CEO Patrick Daniel, "I think we're facing a very strong, almost revolutionary movement to try to get off oil worldwide." And indeed the oil industry has spent many tens of millions of dollars on advertising and lobbyists to defeat these revolutionaries.

But this wasn't enough, apparently. Soon Harperland upped the ante. Like Turkey and Egypt, the government decided to expose the sinister role of foreign influence, including "foreign money," behind Canadian environmental groups. Eight million dollars were accordingly budgeted to allow the Canadian Revenue Agency to audit charitable groups that were, so it was implied, improperly enabling the subversive work of the renegades.

And if the threat of a CRA visit doesn't do the trick, you call in the cavalry: the Senate of Canada. "Recognizing her role as a fundraiser for the Conservative party," so Wikipedia helpfully tells us, in 2009 Nicole Eaton became a Conservative senator. In February 2012, the Hon. Sen. Eaton launched an inquiry into the nefarious "involvement of foreign foundations in Canada's domestic affairs and their abuse of existing Revenue Canada's charitable status."

This too was all about the opposition to the pipeline.

Our Senate, you may have heard, has its own unique political culture. Call it Canada's Wonderland. As Humpty Dumpty informed Alice in her Wonderland, a word mean "just what I choose it to mean." So in the Canadian senate, an inquiry actually does not mean an inquiry. It is a "debate" on a topic chosen by a senator, if anyone wants to debate it, with no concrete outcomes and no vote. An inquiry can last for many days or hardly any. If no one speaks on it for 15 consecutive days, the inquiry is simply dropped. Sen. Eaton's inquiry was launched on Feb. 2, addressed by her in the Senate for 20 minutes on Feb. 28th (with two questions from other senators), and dropped on June 29th because of the 15 day rule. You might call it a non-inquiry inquiry.

As Sen. Eaton's cordial assistant Dustin Hall explained to me in an email, she would not issue a formal report on the findings of the non-inquiry. But she did eventually announce that thanks to bold action by her government – siccing the CRA on certain renegade charitable NGOs – the issues addressed by her non-inquiry were largely resolved.

But not quite, it seems. Enter Public Safety Minister Towes to up the ante once more. In September, Vigilante Vic announced that the government's new comprehensive anti-terrorism strategy would target the real threat to Canadians – eco-extremists, a.k.a. anyone who believed in global warning.

The government, the Minister announced, was now determined to be vigilant not only against foreign threats, but against a treacherous species of domestic extremism that is "based on grievances – real or perceived – revolving around the promotion of various causes such as animal rights, white supremacy, environmentalism and anti-capitalism."

Those are his very words. Similar examples of "domestic issue-based extremism" were said to be the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing-168 killed – and the 2011 Norway massacre – 77 massacred. Just like Canadian environmentalists.

And that's why Canada is a great democratic country that can lecture Egyptians about how they can be greatly democratic too.

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