On Saturday night, Andrew Scheer was elected as the next leader of the federal Conservatives.

At 38 years old, Scheer was the youngest of the 13 candidates in the race (he’d previously served as the youngest Speaker of the House of Commons in the country’s history, as well as a short-lived Opposition House Leader).

Despite his age, Scheer sported some of the most traditionally conservative policies of the bunch, including on the environmental and climate change front.

Here’s a quick rundown on some of the things that Scheer plans to do if his Conservative Party wins the 2019 election, as well as some other key facts to know.

Scheer Wants To Repeal Carbon Pricing

There’s a good reason that Clean Prosperity gave Scheer a ‘D’ in its pre-election “environmental policy report card.”

The main reason for this is his commitment to repeal mandatory carbon pricing, which will hit $50/tonne in 2022 under the federal Liberal plan.

Scheer’s website — which has since been taken down, but can be accessed via the WayBack Machine — argued that carbon pricing “raises the cost of everything and puts jobs at risk while doing little for the environment.”

This contrasts the positions of conservative economists and politicians such as Gregory Mankiw and Preston Manning, as well as a recent analysis of the B.C. carbon tax that indicated the policy had reduced emissions by between five and 15 per cent since implementation in 2008.

Instead of carbon pricing, Scheer pledges to “support a sector by sector approach to reduce greenhouse gases in cooperation with industry and the United States.” It’s rather unclear what that means.

Scheer’s Ties to Ultra-Right Conservatives

Scheer’s campaign team includes some famous faces from the Stephen Harper era.

That includes campaign manager Hamish Marshall — who created and hosted websites for Ezra Levant’s Ethical Oil website, which his wife served as head of — and digital director Stephen Taylor, former director of the National Citizens Coalition (a job Stephen Harper also once held).

As noted by Sean Craig of Global News, Scheer also has associations with The Rebel, a far-right media outlet headed up by Levant, which Marshall serves as a director of.

Scheer has granted The Rebel three one-on-one interviews since late 2016.

Scheer also holds strong anti-abortion views.

Campaign Life Coalition released a statement congratulating Scheer on the win, noting that it demonstrates the “strength of the social conservative movement and importance of pro-life and pro-family voters.” He scored the second-highest ranking from the group after Brad Trost and Pierre Lemieux, both “unapologetic pro-life/pro-family candidates.”

Scheer has promised not to reopen the abortion issue. While he didn’t vote on the 2012 motion to do exactly that, he’s received support from former MPs who did, including Jason Kenney and LaVar Payne.

The Campaign Life Coalition also celebrated Scheer’s commitments to cut federal funding to post-secondary institutions that “do not respect freedom of speech” and “supporting the rights of parents as first educators of their children,” including tax credits for home schooling and independent schools.

As former Sun News pundit Michael Coren noted in a column for NOW: “This is all pretty harsh stuff, to the right of Harper and arguably even Preston Manning and Stockwell Day.”

Scheer has also voted against recent pieces of legislation to enshrine trans rights in the Canadian Human Rights Act and protect Muslim people from Islamophobia.

Despite his age, new Conservative leader Andrew Scheer sported the most conservative policies of the bunch https://t.co/iOyyqevvwQ #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/nlH5Y0h61G

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) May 30, 2017

Scheer Is Very, Very, Very Pro-Oil Industry

As Prime Minister, Scheer pledges that he would approve TransCanada’s Energy East pipeline, which would carry 1.1 million barrels of oil from Alberta to Quebec and New Brunswick.

That’s unqualified support — support he’s pledged regardless of any issues that could be uncovered via environmental assessments or consultations with Indigenous nations.

That same approach is featured in his promise to “prioritize federal infrastructure projects that enhance access to natural resource reserves.”

He’s also pledged to eliminate corporate welfare, including bailouts and subsidies. The obvious example is Bombardier, which has received billions in public dollars in recent decades.

However Scheer has not promised to end the annual awarding of $3.3 billion in subsidies and tax breaks to oil and gas companies in Canada.

In another twist, Scheer pledged to “show Canadians where their oil comes from,” including requiring gas stations to display at the pump when oil comes from “foreign countries.”

According to Scheer, “this would allow Canadian consumers to make the choice to purchase Canadian-sourced, ethically produced oil.”

Sound familiar?

Scheer Has Strong Caucus Support

Unlike other high-profile leadership candidates like Kellie Leitch and Michael Chong, Scheer concluded the race with significant caucus support.

A month before the vote, Scheer sported formal endorsements from 24 current MPs and eight senators, as well as dozens of provincial MLAs and former MPs. Only Erin O’Toole, who placed third in the race, boasted more in total.

This matters a great deal when it comes to successfully leading the party. After all, we’ve seen plenty of examples of what happens when a party dislikes its leader, often resulting in fierce infighting and the creation of huge opportunities for other parties to fill the gap. If Scheer can build on his current caucus support, he could present a strong challenge to Trudeau in 2019.

Funding Massive Projects While Somehow Eliminating the Deficit

A major Conservative attack point against the Liberals is that they’re increasing the country’s deficit beyond what they promised during the election.

It’s a fact. The Liberals promised three years of “modest short-term deficits” of less than $10 billion for the first three years, and a balanced budget in the fiscal year of 2019-2020. But as of the last federal budget, it’s predicted that Canada will hit a deficit of $23.4 billion in 2019-2, dropping to $18.8 billion in 2021-22.

While the verdict is still very much out on whether that even matters given record-low interest rates and a huge infrastructure deficit, it seems a reasonable thing to point out that the Liberals are planning to break another major promise.

So what’s Scheer’s solution? Well, to balance the budget in two years. Unless he plans to raise income taxes or reverse his former leader’s controversial decision to cut the GST from seven to five per cent (which cost the country around $14 billion per year), the only option would be to cut close to $20 billion in annual government spending.

Yet Scheer has consistently pointed to the exporting of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology as as a means to reduce global emissions, a process which costs billions in public funding.

Also left unacknowledged is the fact that Canada’s only operational “clean coal” plant, SaskPower’s Boundary Dam Unit #3, relies on a patented Shell scrubbing system — a privately owned technology that can’t be sold off by the government.

In other words, Scheer’s plan to publicly fund the design and retailing of CCS technology would require billions in public funding, rather than making private large polluters pay via carbon pricing.

That sure sounds like picking winners and losers.

He’ll Need To Build Broad Support To Have A Shot

A pre-convention poll conducted by Nanos Research on behalf of the Globe & Mail found that only 4.1 per cent of the general voting population thought that Scheer would make the best prime minister out of all the candidates.

That’s right, 4.1 per cent.

That’s compared to Maxime Bernier, who received 17.4 per cent, and Michael Chong, who received 10 per cent. A massive 33 per cent of people polled answered “not sure.” When asked if they were more likely to vote for the Conservatives if led by Scheer, only 16.6 per cent responded “somewhat likely” or “likely.” That’s almost half as much as Bernier received.

Of course, there’s plenty of time left until 2019, meaning plenty of opportunities for the Liberals to break more major promises or the NDP to pose a challenge from the left. Nothing is set in stone.

But such numbers suggest that Scheer’s got a lot of work ahead of him to convince ordinary Canadians to vote for him.

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.

When former environment minister Jim Prentice held his introductory lunch with U.S. Ambassador David Jacobson in November 2009, Prentice described to Jacobson how he had been shocked during a visit to Norway to find heated opposition to the Alberta oilsands during a public debate over state-owned StatOil ASA’s investment there.

This information was contained in a cable from Jacobson, which was obtained by WikiLeaks and posted by a Norwegian paper.

Prentice was clearly feeling the heat from a global campaign by environmental organizations to frame oilsands oil as “dirty” because of its energy-intensive extraction, which make for Canada’s fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions.

“The public sentiment in Norway shocked him and has heightened his awareness of the negative consequences to Canada’s historically ‘green’ standing on the world stage,” the cable reported.

An Oilsands PR Makeover[view:in_this_series=block_1]

Given the dismal reputation of the oilsands, the government had three options: (a) clean them up by bringing in environmental legislation; (b) discredit the people creating the negative image; or (c) set up front groups to promote the industry, however dirty it may be.

In his discussion with Jacobson, Prentice suggested he would do (a): “impose new rules on oil sands.” But he never did. The federal government — which has promised to deliver oil and gas regulations since 2007 — offered no help.

Instead Prentice, along with the government of Alberta, got to work changing the oilsands’ image. The campaign began behind-the-scenes with intensive international lobbying focused on fighting the European Union’s proposed ‘dirty’ label for Albertan crude.

While those backroom meetings were taking place, another public strategy was being deployed to revive the image of the oilsands: demean those exposing the environmental disaster unfolding in Northern Alberta.

Shoot the messenger and undermine the message.

A Brief Chronology of the Anti-Enviro Movement  

Enter Vivian Krause.

When Jacobson wrote his cable, Vivian Krause — a former PR specialist for the aquaculture industry — was beavering away in relative obscurity investigating critics of farmed salmon.

Krause had previously worked as a nutritionist for the aquaculture industry, which routinely recruits nutritionists to tout the benefits of all salmon, farmed or wild.

She began attacking critics of aquaculture when she “unexpectedly came across a grant for an ‘antifarming campaign’ with ‘science messages’ and ‘earned media.’”

Within a year of the Prentice-Jacobson lunch, Krause switched to researching the funding of oilsands critics. She says the switch occurred “while going through the tax returns of American charitable foundations to try and figure out who was funding the campaign against salmon farming [when she] happened to notice many grants for a ‘Tar Sands campaign.’”

“That’s when I started to write about the campaign against Alberta oil,” Krause wrote on her blog, Fair Questions.

These claims may be true — “unexpectedly came across,” “happened to notice” — but the timing was fortuitous. It was a message Prentice and his replacements as environment minister, John Baird and Peter Kent, as well as the Harper government and the oilsands industry, all desperately needed, especially as opposition to Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline — a major thoroughfare for oilsands crude destined for Asian markets — was growing to unprecedented levels.

Krause was given a podium for her revelations in the pages of the National Post, where she wrote eighteen columns on the subject, magnifying her voice many times over. The Post featured her as “the girl who played with tax data.”

Repetition over the following year established the frame that because Canadian environmental charities are funded by American money, they are not acting in the interests of Canadians or the environment, but for American oil. The message dissolves on close examination, but few outside the environmental community were examining it closely.

Other, Fairer Questions

Some of the questions not being asked were just how Canadian is Enbridge, or the other proponents of the Northern Gateway pipeline? Or, more broadly, just how Canadian are the oilsands?

Enbridge is one of the largest energy transportation and distribution companies in North America. Its head office may be in Calgary, but its operations span the continent — 61 per cent of revenues are earned from American operations. Forty-four per cent of Enbridge’s shares are owned in the U.S.

Three major Chinese corporations, Petro-China, Sinopec and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, are all backers of the Northern Gateway pipeline and, since the project’s delay, have all become major investors in the oilsands.

A 2012 analysis calculated that 71 per cent of oilsands production was owned by foreign shareholders. Even ostensibly Canadian companies — such as Suncor or Canadian Oil Sands — are majority foreign owned.

The Canadian-versus-American oil interest frame just doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny.

Krause’s research was not difficult to carry out. Many Canadian environmental organizations have obtained charitable status so they can receive grants from philanthropic foundations. These foundations must disclose all the grants they make and this information is assembled in easily accessed web sites where it can be inspected.

Krause herself is not a registered charitable organization so she cannot receive grants from foundations — grants that would be publicly accessible. The money she does receive from corporations and individuals can stay anonymous.

A year after Krause launched her National Post commentaries, she burst onto the political scene. In November 2011, Prime Minister Harper gave an interview with Global TV in Vancouver in which he parroted Krause’s frame, warning that “significant American interests” would be “trying to line up against the Northern Gateway project” which would allow oil companies to export oilsands oil to Asia.

“They’ll funnel money through environmental groups and others in order to try to slow it down but, as I say, we’ll make sure that the best interests of Canada are protected.”

Later in the month, Jim Prentice, by then a vice-chairman at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, echoed this sentiment by telling the National Post that he thought “environmental organizations based outside the country [should] be required to reveal who gives them funding when they participate in Canada’s regulatory process to influence [Canada’s] internal decisions.”

In December, Enbridge president Patrick Daniel joined Harper and Prentice by wondering out loud why “U.S. foundations feel they need to come here to fund opposition to a project that is obviously not in the U.S. national best interest.”

And in the second week of January 2012, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver released his infamous letter warning of “environmental and other radical groups” seeking to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda,” referring to the many groups lining up to speak against the Northern Gateway project at the National Energy Board’s Joint Review Panel hearings.

Oliver’s letter was followed by a slew of ads attacking Canadian environmental organizations mounted by Ethical Oil, the oil industry advocacy group established by conservative gadfly Ezra Levant and Conservative party apparatchik Alykhan Velshi. Ethical Oil acknowledged Krause’s research as a source of information used in their ads as well as the inspiration for several complaint letters submitted to the Canada Revenue Agency questioning the charitable tax status of prominent environmental organizations. Following those complaints, the federal government launched a $13.4 million investigation into charities receiving foreign funding.

On the top of her resume, Krause credits herself for prompting the revenue agency’s audit of charities, which included seven of Canada’s top environmental groups. And a recent investigation by the National Observer argues Krause was given a leg-up by disgraced Senator Mike Duffy, who appears to have played a critical role in advancing Krause’s research in the political arena and connecting her to lucrative sources of industry funding (Krause maintains this is untrue).

Not bad for someone who just “happened to notice many grants for a Tar Sands Campaign.”

Krause insists her work is not funded: “I haven’t been funded by any industry, any company, any political party, any entity of any kind.” She does disclose honoraria she received for speaking to organizations such as the Association of Mineral Exploration in BC, Canadian Energy Pipelines Association and Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

Same goes for 2013 & 2014 (so far) "@Garossino: @FairQuestions conceded >90% of her 2012 income comes from resource sector speaking fees."

— Vivian Krause (@FairQuestions) April 27, 2014

Yes. “@Garossino: Are you saying speaking fees to industry also exceeds 90% of your 2013 + '14 income to date? Details?”

— Vivian Krause (@FairQuestions) April 27, 2014

Krause officially closed down her blog, Fair Questions, in June 2012 and wrote what seems to be her last National Post column in 2014. Krause continues to speak at industry-sponsored events.

The Snowball Effect

With Krause’s rise to prominance the work to discredit Canada’s environmental movement was far from over. Since her humble beginnings in 2011, several other organizations stepped in to carry on the “foreign-funded” attack on environmental groups.

One website named “Our Decision” went online the same week Joe Oliver came gunning after “radical” environmentalists who were trying to stop the Northern Gateway pipeline. The site provides no information about the people behind it although donations go to the Ethical Oil Institute, whose directors are Levant and Thomas Ross, an employer-side labour lawyer whose Calgary firm, McLennan Ross, boasts of a relationship with the oilsands industry that goes back to its origins in the 1960s.

The purpose of “Our Decision” is to collect donations to be marshalled in the war against environmentalists: “Will you help us fight against foreign-funded and controlled lobbyists interfering in Canadian affairs?”

“Follow the Money Trail” is a second web site that promotes the Krause conspiracy theory. The site went online in mid-2014 and is sponsored by British Columbians for Prosperity, a new organization which, like Ethical Oil, provides no information about its financial backers, directors, members or advisers. The site helps us to “follow the money trail and explore the U.S. foundation funding hypocrisy that’s impacting Canada’s sovereignty.”

The organization hired one journalist to do the research and another to disseminate the findings. The findings, such as they are, had already been found by Krause.

And on it goes. Repeat this message: American billionaires back Canadian environmental organizations opposed to oilsands expansion and pipeline construction, not because oilsands developments threaten the environment or add to global warming, but because they are detrimental to American oil interests.

A perfect bait-and-switch strategy.

Meanwhile, little light has being shed on the funding of citizen groups defending oil production and export.

Unlike environmental groups, whose spokespeople have a clear public profile and whose organizations have long-standing missions, publicly-known board members and financial records, the same cannot be said of pop-up defenders of oil interests such as the Ethical Oil Institute and British Columbians for Prosperity.

Their activities remain shrouded in secrecy.

Image Credit: Vivian Krause speaks at She Talks Resources. Photo by Mychaylo Prystupa

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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

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.

Today Vivian Krause published an opinion piece in The Province claiming “a vote for Vision is a vote for U.S. oil interests.” So, you might be wondering: just who is Vivian Krause? We’re so glad you asked…

An essential component of all public relations campaigns is having the right messenger— a credible, impassioned champion of your cause.

While many PR pushes fail to get off the ground, those that really catch on — the ones that gain political attention and result in debates and senate inquiries — almost always have precisely the right poster child.

And in the federal government and oil industry’s plight to discredit environmental groups, the perfect poster child just so happens to be Vivian Krause.

Krause describes herself as an “independent” researcher and a single mom asking “fair questions” about American funding of Canadian environmental groups. She blogged for many years in relative obscurity before becoming the federal Conservatives’ favourite attack dog.

Krause’s moment in the sun came in January 2012 when Joe Oliver, Canada’s then Natural Resources Minister, released his infamous letter decrying “foreign-funded radical” environmentalists for “hijacking” the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline review process.

Krause had primed the pump for the Conservatives to swoop in and achieve their goal — to discredit environmental groups by building a public narrative about them acting nefariously, thereby justifying spending millions of dollars on audits of charities’ political activities.

Never mind that philanthropic dollars cross international borders all the time. Never mind that the Northern Gateway proposal is sponsored by China’s state-owned oil company Sinopec, along with many other foreign oil companies. Never mind that there’s probably no more legitimate participation in a democracy than citizens signing up to speak at public hearings.

No, once you have a vendetta, inconvenient facts don’t matter. And Krause’s vendetta against environmental groups has been in the works for a long time — ever since she worked in public relations for the farmed salmon industry.

The Salmon Farming Industry and the Birth of a Vendetta

It was due to her interest in promoting salmon farming that Krause started rifling through the tax returns of large American foundations supporting wild salmon advocacy in Canada.

It didn’t take long for Vivian Krause to cook up a conspiracy theory involving American foundations working to undermine Canadian interests — and then to expand that theory to any number of conservation issues in Canada, with a special focus on conservation campaigns that were inconvenient for the oil industry.

To Krause, it seemed suspicious that foundations from across the border were giving money to Canadian groups working on Canadian conservation and energy issues. It must be, Krause surmised, that these big foundations are spending their dollars to manipulate Canadian energy and environment politics to further American interests. And, she went further to suggest, these Canadian groups are acting as pawns of these suspicious foundations.

Speaking of suspicious, by early 2013, Krause had admitted that more than 90 per cent of her income for 2012 had come from oil, gas and mining interests. Groups paying Krause speaker’s fees included the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, the Association for Mineral Exploration and the Vancouver Board of Trade.

Vivian Krause's Convenient Aversion to Climate Change Facts

Fast forward to this week when Krause couldn’t resist weighing into the Vancouver election campaign, claiming that: “For Canada, there is no single economic issue that is more important than getting Alberta oil to global markets.”

While oil is no doubt an important part of the Canadian economy, Krause’s statement overlooks two inconvenient facts:

1) According to Statistics Canada, the oilsands account for only two per cent of the national GDP.

2) A study by Simon Fraser University and The Goodman Group Ltd released this week finds Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain jobs promises are overblown and recommends the proposed expansion be rejected as it is neither in the economic nor public interest of B.C. and Metro Vancouver.

The argument that continued oilsands expansion is a positive for the Canadian economy — and more to the point, the Metro Vancouver economy — is far from a slam dunk.

While Krause enjoys spinning another of her clandestine tales in linking Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson to U.S. foundations, it’s increasingly clear that it’s all a convenient cover story for her to push her own view that the fossil fuel industry should be allowed to expand.

“Voting for Gregor Robertson means voting to support a U.S.-funded, anti-pipeline campaign that continues the U.S. monopoly on Canadian oil, keeping Canada over a barrel,” Krause writes. “When you go to the poll, don’t vote for Gregor Robertson. Vote for Canada.”

Perhaps Krause missed the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which states that governments need to peak emissions, rapidly phase out fossil fuels and transition to 100 per cent renewable energy pronto? Rapidly expanding the oilsands and building new pipelines to serve that expansion doesn’t actually fit into any plans to have an inhabitable earth — not to mention the terrifying consequences an oil spill could reap on Vancouver.

If Krause’s modus operandi is climate change denial, it would be nice if she just stated that right up front, instead of conveniently ignoring it.

(If you want to know where we’re coming from at DeSmog Canada, mosey on over to our About Us page, where you can find out. Hint: we agree with 97 per cent of scientists about climate change, we’re proud to accept donations from anyone who supports our mission and we’re not going to tell you how to vote because that’s not our thing.)

In a recent op-ed in the Calgary Herald, Barry Cooper, a University of Calgary professor and known climate skeptic called on Alberta Premier Jim Prentice to use Krause as an attack dog against environmental groups.

“[Prentice] knows from his work with Enbridge and B.C. First Nations that the real source of opposition to Northern Gateway are the enviros and the deep-pocketed American foundations that fund them,” Cooper wrote. “So, Jim, hire Vivian Krause, who has done a lot of work on this problem, and use the government megaphone to publicize her analyses of the pernicious sources of enviro funding.”

Which raises the question: did someone hire Krause to weigh in — clumsy as it may be — on the Vancouver election?

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.

This article originally appeared on mikedesouza.com.

On the eve of an international climate change summit of government leaders in New York, Canada is being challenged about its own domestic record in addressing the heat-trapping pollution that contributes to global warming.

Here’s a historical timeline of some of the major climate change policies, statements and related decisions made by Canada since 2006 when Prime Minister Stephen Harper was first elected to form a government.

From a pledge to introduce a carbon tax in 2007 to internal debates about climate change science, this timeline covers the promises and the action by the Canadian government in recent years.

February 2006:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government is sworn in after his Conservative Party wins a general election with a minority of seats in the Canadian House of Commons. The election ends a 13-year-old government led by the Liberal Party of Canada.

Harper’s Conservatives mainly focused on accountability and tax cuts during the campaign. They also criticized Canada’s participation in the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, pledging to introduce a “made-in-Canada” solution to promote a healthy environment.

The newly-elected government cancels billions of dollars in federal spending to address climate change and promote energy efficiency. They also cancel work underway within Environment Canada to regulate greenhouse gases from large industrial facilities, describing the country’s legally-binding Kyoto target as unrealistic.

Harper and members of his cabinet note that the previous Liberal administration had promised to take action on climate change, but didn’t do anything to stop the rise in industrial greenhouse gas emissions that put Canada’s Kyoto target out of reach.

May 2006:

The Globe and Mail reports on leaked documents from international climate talks in Bonn, Germany, that reveal the Harper government has instructed its negotiators to oppose “stringent targets” for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The newspaper reports that the instructions tell negotiators to instead favour a voluntary approach to addressing climate-warming pollution.

Environmental groups accuse the government of sabotaging the talks. It’s the first of many conferences over the next decade in which critics describe Canada as the worst and least helpful party at the negotiating table on climate change issues.

September 2006:

Environment Minister Rona Ambrose pledges to introduce a new law that would use the federal government’s constitutional authority to require all industrial sectors to reduce pollution. Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers president Pierre Alvarez says that his industry is prepared to accept targets as long as other sectors faced the same regulations.

The opposition, which forms a majority in the House of Commons, would later reject her proposed legislation as inadequate. The opposition parties would then attempt to rewrite the bill, but the new version was abandoned by the Conservative government that claimed it would harm the Canadian economy.

March 2007:

Preserving the environment is one of the top themes of Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s federal budget. The plan includes $4.5 billion in spending “to clean our air and water, reduce greenhouse gases and combat climate change, as well as protect our natural environment.” The budget also restores funding to some measures that were scrapped, one year earlier, by the government, reintroducing them with new names.

April 2007:

Environment Minister John Baird unveils new targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution across the Canadian economy. The targets set new goals that are aggressive, but weaker than Canada’s existing commitments, under the Kyoto Protocol. Baird says that the new targets will come into force as early as 2010 for some sectors at an estimated cost of about $8 billion to the Canadian economy.

The Conservative plan proposes to give companies the possibility of meeting their targets by paying a $15 carbon tax per tonne of emissions that would go into a fund supporting the development of new technologies.

Baird’s new “Turning the Corner” plan also estimates the targets will also result in health benefits worth about $6 billion due to a reduction in air pollution and related respiratory illnesses.

“This is a mammoth undertaking,” Baird tells a news conference in Toronto. “It doesn’t end today. Global warming, climate change is one of the biggest ecological threats the environment has ever faced, and it’s going to require work every day, every week, every month and every year.”

Despite extensive consultations with all major industrial sectors over the previous year, Baird explains that more negotiations with industry would likely follow before introducing any draft regulations.

June 2007:

Speaking to an audience in Germany, Prime Minister Stephen Harper describes climate change as “perhaps the biggest threat to confront the future of humanity today.” He also notes that Canada was a small contributor to global warming since it was responsible for two per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

“But we owe it to future generations to do whatever we can to address this world problem,” Harper says. “And Canadians, blessed as we are, should make a substantial contribution to confronting this challenge.”

He also says in his speech that his government has already introduced mandatory emissions reductions targets for large emitters that would result in “absolute reductions in emissions levels by at least 2012 and as early as 2010.”

October 2008:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative party is re-elected as a minority government in a general election, following a campaign in which the party pledged to introduce a cap and trade system as part of its climate change policies. The system would set targets to cap pollution from industry and then allow facilities to meet targets either by reducing emissions or by purchasing credits. The credits could be sold provided that they have certified a reduction in emissions beyond business as usual.

Harper names Jim Prentice as his third environment minister after winning the election.

The global financial crisis and lobbying from industry warning about economic impacts would later derail legislation in the U.S. to introduce a cap and trade system.

December 2009:

An international climate change summit in Copenhagen, Denmark collapses without a binding agreement.

Stephen Harper signs a new voluntary climate change accord spear-headed by U.S. President Barack Obama. Harper weakens Canada’s previous target set under Baird’s Turning the Corner proposal, but matches a target set by the Obama administration.

February 2010:

Jim Prentice criticizes the Quebec government for planning its own aggressive fuel economy tailpipe standards for cars, describing the province’s approach as a “folly.”

October 2010:

The Harper government adopts new fuel economy rules, based largely on the Quebec and California model, matching regulations introduced by the Obama administration to reduce tailpipe pollution from new cars. Environment Canada estimates the new regulations will save the equivalent of 28 billion litres of fuel between 2011 and 2016. Jim Prentice sayshigher costs of purchasing cars would be offset by savings in fuel consumption and that the regulations would also encourage more electric cars on Canadian roads.

November 2010:

Prentice resigns from federal politics to accept a job as a vice-president of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and is temporarily replaced as environment minister by John Baird.

December 2010:

John Baird hails a series of agreements reached at an international climate change summit in Cancun, Mexico as the “first step” toward a binding global deal to ensure greenhouse gases peak within a decade and then start to decline. But he also warns that it would be mathematically impossible to stabilize emissions in the atmosphere without getting the biggest polluters, China, India and the United States, to take on firm commitments.

“I hope that coming out of Cancun that people, other countries will reflect,” Baird says. “Whatever we’ve been trying for the last 13 years hasn’t worked. Emissions are way up since 1997. If we want to stabilize them by 2015 or 2020, we’re going to have to get the big players involved.”

January 2011:

Peter Kent becomes Stephen Harper’s fourth environment minister and begins his new role by praising Canadian oil as an “ethical” fuel.

February 2011:

The Harper government confirms that it is no longer pursuing a cap and trade regime, but aiming to introduce new mandatory rules and standards for industrial pollution.

Peter Kent says in an interview that the government had a “target” of introducing all of its proposed greenhouse gas regulations by the end of 2011.

May 2011:

Following a general election, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives are re-elected, this time forming a majority in the House of Commons.

September 2011:

Peter Kent says the spring federal election has delayed work on the oil and gas regulations and that they wouldn’t be introduced in 2011.

Fall 2011:

Environment Canada creates a new group to work on the oil and gas regulations. It includes representatives from the Alberta government, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and three oil companies – Canadian Natural Resources Limited, Cenovus and Suncor. The group meets roughly once every four weeks.

December 2011:

Peter Kent announces that Canada is withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol.

Across the government, officials are working on plans behind the scenes to reduce federal oversight of industrial activities and accelerate energy and resource development.

These plans follow a decision by President Obama to delay approval of the Keystone XL pipeline expansion project, that would allow for more oilsands exports from Alberta to the United States.

The new federal policies and laws would also respond to many detailed requests from oil, gas and pipeline lobbyists.

In response to questions about the Kyoto withdrawal in the House of Commons, Stephen Harper says: “I have said many times that climate change is a great problem for the world.”

March 2012:

The Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Research is forced to shut its doors after repeated requests for renewed funding fall on deaf ears. The foundation had offered about $120 million in university grants for climate and weather-related research over about 10 years. The total is above the $110 million multi-year grant it received from the government.

The foundation would later rebrand itself as the Canadian Climate Forum, relying on private donors to fund its work.

A labour union representing federal scientists, the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, would also estimate that the Canadian government was in the middle of a three-year purge, cutting nearly $3 billion in spending and up to 5,000 jobs from its science-based departments, including many scientific research positions and programs in charge of monitoring air, water, and wildlife.

One of the victims of the cuts is the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Lab – also known as PEARL – a scientific observatory station near Eureka in the high Arctic that loses about a third of its federal funding and is no longer able to remain fully operational throughout the entire year.

The government instead opts to spend millions of dollars to build a new research station that is more than 1,000 kilometres to the southwest.

April 2012:

The Harper government introduces a 400-page document in Parliament that proposes to scrap major Canadian environmental laws and replace them with new legislation.

May 2012:

At international negotiations, Guy Saint-Jacques, then the former chief federal climate change negotiator and ambassador, says that the Canadian government is working towards draft regulations for 2013” in the oil and gas sector.

“Once we have finalized the oil and gas regulations, we will have covered some 60 per cent of our emissions,” Saint-Jacques told his international counterparts.

June 2012:

A series of newly-released letters reveals that Peter Kent has been challenged by many of his caucus colleagues, including the prime minister, to answer questions about whether scientific evidence is real about climate change and whether the phenomenon requires a government response. When asked about the letters, Kent says that having debates and being challenged demonstrates the “vitality of any government.”

July 2012:

New environmental laws adopted by Parliament eliminate nearly 3,000 federal environmental reviews of industrial projects, including hundreds of projects related to oil, gas and pipeline development.

September 2012:

Peter Kent announces the government has finalized its regulations for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from coal power plants, predicting that the new rules will result in the equivalent of taking about 2.6 million vehicles off Canadian roads over 21 years. The new rules are slated to come into force on July 1, 2015.

His department, meantime, confirms it has handed over the monitoring of data for ozone and radiation in the atmosphere, previously done by atmospheric scientists, to an information technology computer expert.

November 2012:

Following damage caused to the U.S. northeast by Hurricane Sandy, Peter Kent says climate change is a “very real and present danger” that governments need to address.

December 2012:

Canada confirms its withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol.

February 2013:

Peter Kent says the federal government is “very close” to finalizing new carbon pollution regulations for oil and gas companies.

April 2013:

Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver, who would later become finance minister in 2014,says in an interview with La Presse that scientists are exaggerating the climate crisis. He follows others in Harper’s cabinet and caucus who had cast doubts on occasion about whether humans are significantly contributing to climate change. Those include the prime minister, junior industry minister Maxime Bernier, former public safety minister Stockwell Day and Senator Nancy Greene Raine, a former Winter Olympic champion skier.

March 2013:

The special group created by Environment Canada to develop greenhouse gas regulations for oil and gas companies has its final meeting.

Environment Canada later explains that its engagement with stakeholders on regulations was continuing on many fronts, but that it was moving toward more targeted discussions.

April 2013:

In internal correspondence with the provincial government in Alberta, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers expresses concerns about stringent climate change policies, suggesting that the government should spend more time studying the issue. The industry lobby group also tells the government that tough regulations won’t satisfy its biggest critics.

June 2013:

Peter Kent says industry groups are cooperating with the government’s efforts to introduce regulations, also noting that companies are concerned about “maximiz(ing) profits for their shareholders.”

July 2013:

After being replaced in a cabinet shuffle by Harper’s fifth environment minister, Leona Aglukkaq, Peter Kent says he was “profoundly disappointed” that the government didn’t complete the oil and gas regulations under his watch. He reiterates that the government was close but had to navigate through many lobby interests as well as concerns of putting jobs or investments at risk.

September 2013:

Leona Aglukkaq’s office prevents her department from publicly stating that the government accepts scientific evidence that humans are causing climate change and takes the matter seriously.

Aglukkaq later gives a television interview in which she casts doubts about whether ice is melting in the Arctic.

October 2013:

The Harper government opens a new session of Parliament with a throne speech saying that it will work with provinces to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from oil and gas companies.

November 2013:

Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq says she’s “not ready” to introduce new regulations for oil and gas companies.

June 2014:

Stephen Harper, at a joint news conference with visiting Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, suggests other countries aren’t being frank about scaling back climate change policies to protect their economies. He suggests aggressive action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including a carbon tax, would harm the economy.

Image Credit: Prime Minister Stephen Harper on his 9th annual Arctic visit. Image courtesy of the Prime Minister of Canada's photo gallery.

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When Greenpeace Canada’s climate and energy campaigner Keith Stewart filed an official complaint with Elections Canada, he did a lot more than question the implications of the Ethical Oil Institute’s collusion with the Conservative Party of Canada: he called national attention to the corrosive effect oil money has had on Canadian politics in recent years.

“At the broadest level,” Stewart told DeSmog Canada via e-mail, “we are trying to rebalance the playing field between money and people power in Canadian politics. You can never eliminate the influence of money on politics, but you can limit it and make it more transparent.”

Greenpeace’s request for an investigation is based on the fact that corporate donations to political parties are banned in federal politics — yet money raised by the Ethical Oil Institute appears to have been spent on advertising and other activities developed and implemented by people directly involved in the Conservative Party of Canada. The institute does not disclose its funding sources, but its website states it does “accept donations from Canadian individuals and companies, including those working to produce Ethical Oil.”

Stewart’s request outlines the revolving-door relationships driving pro-oilsands communications strategies from Fort McMurray to Ottawa and how deeply those relations are embedded in the political soil. The institute was founded in July 2011 by Alykhan Velshi, who left Jason Kenney’s political staff to create Ethical Oil. He returned within a few months to a senior position in the Prime Minister’s Office.

A Greenpeace map of the overlapping relations between Ethical Oil and the Conservative government. Click to enlarge.

Ultimately, the request to investigate the Ethical Oil Institute’s use of contributions to carry out a Conservative agenda has to do with uprooting the pernicious influence of oil on Canadian democracy.

“We are trying to prevent the oil patch from pouring money into an Ethical Oil-led, pro-Conservative ad campaign in advance of the 2015 federal election,” Stewart said.

According to Stewart, Ethical Oil “is trying to import a U.S. model of establishing fake grassroots groups” to lend cultural legitimacy to an “elite agenda.” In this case, he said the campaign is designed to make the protection of oil interests — in the face of a warming world — seem “somehow in the interest of the average citizen.”

“It’s dishonest and destructive,” he said.

Ethical Oil responded to the complaint by claiming “EthicalOil.org does not give any money to any political party, nor has Ethical Oil campaigned in any election,” even though Greenpeace’s charge is leveled at the Ethical Oil Institute, not against the website EthicalOil.org — which is just one aspect of the institute’s work.

The Ethical Oil Institute is behind arguments such as Canada’s oil being like fair-trade coffee and foreign-funded interests lurking behind Canada’s environmental movement. The accusations have been instrumental in the ongoing audits of Canada’s most prominent environmental charities, many of whom were targeted in Ethical Oil attacks.

“Ethical Oil is trying to hide the corrosive effect of oil on our politics by telling Canadians that the poor little oil companies are being picked on by big mean environmentalists,” Stewart said.

Yet, as Stewart lays out in his letter to Elections Canada, the work of the Ethical Oil Institute has been in lockstep with the Conservative party to influence public opinion on oil development and mischaracterize environmental groups.

“Their attack on environmental charities is a blatant attempt to silence those who are critical of the Harper government agenda on oil and the environment and to block a national conversation on what kind of an energy future we want,” he said.

Ultimately, Stewart said, Canada needs to start taking climate science seriously, a move impaired by the work of groups like Ethical Oil.

“I’d like to see the government take the latest reports from the IPCC and boil them down to what this means for Canada in terms of possible impacts and what opportunities are there for us on an energy pathway that is consistent with avoiding the worst impacts of climate change,” Stewart said.   

“We could then take these on the road and have the kind of community-led discussions that have happened before on the issue of national unity, which could help build consensus on what we need to do.”

Image Credit: Greenpeace Canada

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“Speak the truth, but not to punish.”

These are the words the famous Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh told DeSmogBlog and DeSmog Canada founder, president and contributor James Hoggan one afternoon in a conversation about environmental advocacy and the collapse of productive public discourse.

Over the course of three years James (Jim) Hoggan has engaged the minds of communications specialists, philosophers, leading public intellectuals and spiritual leaders while writing a book designed to address the bewildering question: “why, when we know so much about the global environmental crisis, are we doing so little?”

Hoggan recently recounted some of the insights he has gained into this question when he spoke at the Walrus Talks “The Art of Conversation.”

He begins with the basic axiom shared by cognitive scientist Dan Kahan, “just as you can pollute the natural environment, you can pollute public conversations.” From that the logic follows – if we’re serious about resolving our environmental problems, we are going to have to attend equally to the state of our public discourse.

In Canada, says Hoggan, we face particular challenges when it comes to polluted pubic conversations, especially with the heightened tenor of rhetoric regarding environmentalism and energy issues surrounding the oilsands and proposed pipelines.

"The ethical oil, foreign funded radicals campaign," he says, "has made Canadians less able to weigh facts honestly, disagree constructively, and think things through collectively."

You can watch a short video of Hoggan’s talk on The Walrus, or read the transcript below:

Good evening, I’m Jim Hoggan. I wanted to start by saying I’m not speaking here as the chair of the David Suzuki Foundation, but as the author of a book that I’m writing called The Polluted Public Square.

In this book I’m on a personal journey to learn from public intellectuals. I travel from Oxford, to Harvard, to Yale to MIT; I had tea with the expert on public trust in the House of Lords dining room; I spent a week with the Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh; I traveled to the Himalayas to interview the Dalai Lama. So I’ve spent three years on this journey. Originally I thought I was writing a book for other people, but I realized as I was going through this that I was actually writing a book for myself.

The book is about this question of public conversations and the state of public discourse. And the specific question I asked all of these people, was “why is it, in spite of all this scientific evidence, from experts in atmospheric, marine and life sciences, are we doing so little to fix these big environmental problems that we’re creating? And why isn’t public discourse on the environment more data driven? Why are we listening to each other shout rather than listening to what the evidence is trying to tell us?"

One of the first interviews I did was with a Yale Law School cognitive scientist named Dr. Dan Kahan. He had part of the answer for me. He said, “just as you can pollute the natural environment, you can pollute public conversations.”

He said that healthy public discourse is a public good that is every bit as important as the natural environment; that we should be willing to protect, consciously protect, the state and the health of public discourse; and that we were in Canada and the United States suffering from he called a ‘social pathology.’

And this kind of healthy public discourse, or healthy attitude to public discourse, is certainly something that we’re not paying much attention to in Canada these days.

In 2012 – let me take you back to something the Conservative government would probably rather we all forgot about – in early 2012 some folks in the oil and gas industry launched a PR campaign with this message: ethical oil is like fair trade coffee. It’s like conflict-free diamonds. It’s morally superior.

In 2012 the oil and gas industry worked closely with the Conservative government to convince Canadians that British Columbians who opposed tankers on the coast of B.C. were extremists working for American business interests.

Now, environmental activists have been polluting the public square for a long time: they’ve called the oilsands heroin, they’ve called it blood oil, they’ve called oil companies environmental criminals engaged in crimes against humanity.

Now who would have thought that this level of rhetoric could be raised any higher? But it was.

Senator Mike Duffy called B.C. charities “un-Canadian.” The minister of environment accused them of money laundering. The PMO called them “foreign funded radicals.” Senator Don Plett said, where would environmentalists draw the line on who they receive money from? Would they take money from Al-Qaeda? The Taliban? Hamas?

So in 2012, as Terry Glavin put it, suddenly we had sleeper cells of Ducks Unlimited popping up across Canada.

Now I’m not suggesting equivalency here. These environmentalists have the evidence of climate change on their side. They’re arguing against the inaction from an industry that’s in a lot of trouble as the world realizes that their product is changing the climate. And they haven’t done a very good job of handing that trouble.

I met a guy in Harlem at a coffee shop. His name is Jason Stanley and he writes for the New York Times and teaches philosophy of language and a class in democracy and propaganda at Yale. And he said that when oil from Fort McMurray is called ‘ethical oil,’ or coal from West Virginia is called ‘clean coal,’ it’s difficult to have a real discussion about the pros and cons. He explained that these kinds of improbable assertions, where words are misappropriated and their meanings twisted, are not so much about making substantial claims, but they’re about silencing.

He called them linguistic strategies for stealing the voices of others.

He said Fox News engages in silencing when it describes itself ‘fair and balanced’ to an audience that is perfectly aware that it is neither. The effect is to suggest that there’s not such thing as fair and balanced. That there’s no possibility of balanced news, only propaganda.

Canada’s public square is polluted with a toxic form of rhetoric that insinuates that there are no facts, there is no objectivity, and that everyone is trying to manipulate you for their own interests. Our belief in sincerity and objectivity itself is under attack. So when everything is mislabeled and you can’t trust anything that anyone says, why bother with the public square?

The American linguist Deborah Tannen puts it this way: when you hear a ruckus outside your house at night, you open the window to see what’s going on. But if there’s a ruckus every night, you close the shutters and ignore it.

The ethical oil, foreign funded radicals campaign has made Canadians less able to weigh facts honestly, disagree constructively, and think things through collectively.

Now how you clean up the public square – my book is 120,000 words – that’s a big question for a seven-minute speech.

But let me say this: “I’m right, your wrong. Let me tell you what you should think” is not a great communications strategy.

Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt told me that, and also said it doesn’t work because we all think we’re right. Haidt argues that people are divided by politics and religion, not because some people are good and others are evil, but because our minds were designed for ‘groupish righteousness.’ Morality binds and blinds us. Our righteousness minds were developed by evolution to unite us into teams, divide us against other teams, and blind us to the truth. Haidt suggests we step outside the self-righteousness of what he calls our moral matrix, and look to the Dalai Lama to see the power of moral humility and that we take the time to understand the values and worldviews of people we strongly disagree with.

I also interviewed Ted-prize winner Karen Armstrong who developed the charter for compassion. She put it this way: we must speak out against injustice, but not in a way that causes more hatred. She told me, remember what St. Paul said: charity takes no delight in the wrongdoing of others.

So my time’s up, but I just want to say one more thing. Since the 60s I’ve been reading Eastern philosophy and following particularly Zen Buddhism. So a little while ago David Suzuki and I were lucky enough to spend an afternoon with the famous Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. And he kept saying to David, people don’t need to know more about destroying the planet. They already know they’re destroying the planet. You need to deal with the despair. So I kept listening to him and it sounded to me like he was saying we should go meditated.

So I said to him, “in Canada, Canadians expect the David Suzuki Foundation to speak up on behalf of the environment. You’re not saying we shouldn’t be activists?”

It’s hard, I’ve been trying to think of how I could describe the way he looked at me. But it was with this kind of silence and deepness that I can’t remember having anyone look at me like that before. So he looked at me and he said, “speak the truth but not to punish.”

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Recently DeSmogBlog.com and DeSmog.ca founder Jim Hoggan spoke with Pamela McCall on CFAX 1070 about his upcoming participation in an workshop series put on by The Walrus Talks called The Art of Conversation. 

Jim has written extensively about what he calls the "Polluted Public Square," a concept he is refining for his upcoming book of that title. Jim's expertise in the world of public relations puts him at a particular advantage when parsing out just how public conversations are used and abused to shape public perception, especially on controversial topics. But more crucially, he sees the way the public is disengaging from the social fora our democratic institutions rely upon. The answer to the question Jim has been seeking – why when we know so much are we doing so little? – has to do with a widespread case of social mistrust that points back to the fundamental problem of the polluted public square.

Jim had the opportunity to delve a little more into his research and how it all ties into the upcoming event The Art of Conversation in his discussion with Pamela McCall. Listen below or scroll down for a transcript of the interview.

Pamela: “You’re focusing specifically on empathy and what you call the polluted public square. That sounds fascinating.”

Jim: “The polluted public square is a book I’ve been writing for the last three years. And I’ve gone around the world talking to social scientists and public intellectuals. I went to Harvard and MIT and Yale and Columbia, I even went to the Himalayas and spent some time with the Dalai Lama talking about public discourse and the environment.

The question I was asking people is why is it, in spite of all of this evidence that we have of human impact on the climate and oceans and the environment around us and the destructive nature of that impact, are we doing so little about what these scientists are ringing the alarm bells about?

I looked at public discourse and public conversations and I’m puzzled that public conversations aren’t more data driven. It’s more about shouting and arguing and I think most people kind of turn away from the public square these days because of that. They look at the people who are involved in these issues, especially environmental issues, and they see people in the end zones and nobody’s near the 50 yard line where there’s any possibility of some kind of solution. And so they turn away. So we have very high levels of disinterest and mistrust in public thinking and in public conversations in Canada today."

Pamela: “Why do the people who are shouting and arguing take precedence over those on the sidelines?”

Jim: “Well they’re engaged. You have civil society, you have government, you have business and they have to protect their interests and they have to move interests forward. In the case of government and business you typically have groups of people trying to preserve the status quo. With civil society you have people who are trying to change it. So people get frustrated, they don’t know how to deal with some of these issues – they’re so tough – and so you have business and industry pumping the public square full of a kind of propaganda pollution, I would call it.

If you look at last year some of the stuff we were hearing about ‘foreign funded radicals’ so people who were opposed to pipelines and tankers on the coast were demonized by government and by the oil and gas industry as foreign funded radicals. We have this ‘ethical oil’ campaign, that is such a goofy idea, that has basically dominated the airwaves over the last couple of years with this idea that "ethical oil" from the oilsands is like fair trade coffee.

And then on the other side of things you have some environmentalists demonizing the oil and gas industry and calling the oilsands heroine or suggesting that people who are working for these companies are environmental criminals. And so when you have these very high levels of rhetoric the public looks at this and says, “geesh, you know, it doesn’t look like there’s much of a solution there!” And they turn away and it’s very serious.

I think that just as you can pollute the natural environment you can pollute public conversations. And public conversations and democracies are something that many people – you know, grandfathers and great great grandfathers – fought to protect. And what was it they were fighting to protect? I think it was in part our ability to be able to solve problems together, to have honest conversations, to be able to disagree constructively, work things out with people you don’t agree with. So when we pollute the public square we’re polluting a good that a lot of people have worked hard to created.

We tend to think the worst environmental problem is climate change or whatever but I think this is a bigger environmental problem – that we’re polluting public discourse to the point that it doesn’t work.”

Pamela: “Is it not incumbent upon those on the outside to find the middle ground?”

Jim: “Well I don’t think the there’s a middle ground.”

Pamela: “But is there not room for one?”

Jim: “I think there are solutions. But I don’t think it’s just well you’re a little bit right, you’re a little bit wrong, and so are you a little bit right and I’m a little bit wrong. Some of these things that we’re doing with industry and government are just unsustainable and so they do need to change. So what we need is ways to figure out how we move people forward as opposed to just the constant fighting.

There’s this amazing woman from the United States, a social scientist named Deborah Tannen who wrote a book called The Argument Culture and she said that if you hear a ruckus outside your house you naturally open the window to see what’s going on but if there’s a ruckus outside your house every night you just close the windows and sort of batten down the hatches and you ignore it. Now that is not a good way to run a democracy.

Another way of thinking about it, there’s a guy named Jonathan Haidt who I talked to, a moral psychologist, and he said, ‘I’m right, you’re wrong, let me tell you what you should think’ is not a good communication strategy. And the reason it’s not is because we all think we’re right. And so I think when you’re contstantly in the fighting mode things don’t move towards solutions.”

Pamela: “I’m interested in much of what you’re saying and how did you get an audience with the Dalai Lama and what did he say about it?”

Jim: “Well at first they said no. I’m on the board for the Dalai Lama Centre for Peace and Education and so I’ve got a bit of an in, but at first they said no and eventually I persisted and they said yes. And he was very interesting. He said – and I was talking to him about climate change and the impact of climate change in Tibet that he’s very worried about – and he said that – apparently in wikileaks it came out that he said – he’s more worried about the impact of climate change on Tibet than he was about the relationship between Tibet and Beijing. And I was quite surprised about that and so I asked him if he said it and he said yes.

So then I went on to ask him about this problem of how do we find solutions? How do we move forward on these big problems like climate change? I think he said for 39 years he’s been talking to people about compassion, just over and over again the same thing, and he only feels that just now people are starting to listen. I think what he was saying is there’s a need for patience and persistence, and that in Tibet he said they have a saying that goes, “fail once, try again. Fail again? Again try. Nine times fail, nine times try again.”

At the end of the interview we were standing up and he reached over with his finger and touched my forehead. He said “we sometimes think that the Western mind is more sophisticated, but I think the Tibetan heart might be stronger. Maybe if the Tibetan heart, or the Eastern heart, and the Western mind work together we could solve these problems.”

I think there’s something there, that respecting other people, bringing more empathy into public discourse would go a long way to moving us towards the tables that may build the solutions to some very tough problems that we’re facing.”

Pamela: “Jim how do we turn things around when the shouting and the arguing, as you postulate, has usurped reason?”

Jim: “One of the things I’ve learned is that talking to all these people, is that I would be the last person you’d want to be a know-it-all about this. The way that I see them, these are very complicated problems. Peter Senge just said something to me a couple of weeks ago, I was at a course with him and he’s an MIT Business prof, and he said the success of any intervention, the most important determinant of the success of any intervention, is the inner state of the intervener. And I think that’s right.

It’s taking the board out of your own eyeball before you work on the sliver in somebody else’s. I think it starts there. And I think that we bring a lot of baggage to the public square, that self-awareness and a sort of deeper thinking about our own intentions and our own baggage is probably the first step.

And then I think remembering that you could be wrong. The idea is to realize that we all have this tendency to slip into self-righteousness and it’s much easier for us to see the wrong doing in others than in ourselves. Going back to some of those basic lessons that we learned from our Mom and Dad and the church and the synagogue, those are really important human lessons about how to interact with each other.

I don’t think that pointing your finger, pointing in someone’s chest, and then trying to tell them what they should be thinking about – which sounds funny but if you really look at the kind of stuff that you hear people saying, it’s kind of like that – that doesn’t help, I don’t think. We are not going to solve these problems on our own and we’re going to have to work with people and try to figure out how to have more constructive relationships with people, not that we just disagree with, but that we just don’t like. And we need to figure it out.

People like the Dalai Lama have been working it a long time and I think there’s wisdom there, in empathy.”

Pamela: “I find also it underscores the apathy, the kind of research you’re doing. It explains why people will stand on the sidelines and be overwhelmed.”

Jim: “That’s right, but I would caution about thinking about it as apathy because the research shows that people aren’t as apathetic as they are disinterested and mistrustful and believing they can’t make a difference.”

Pamela: “Does that not lead to apathy though?”

Jim: “Well I think apathy means people don’t care. I think people do care, it’s just that they think they can’t do anything and it’s reinforced by what you just said, that the people in the end zones have no intention of trying to compromise, of reaching some kind of arrangement. So they turn away. They know they’re could maybe go and do something but the guy across the street may cancel out whatever they could do. They go and but a Prius and the guy across the street goes and buys a Hummer and if he doesn’t, somebody in Beijing will. So the problems are just so big that when they look around they don’t see any intention on the part of leaders to really do something.”

——

The Art of Conversation is taking place in Victoria at the Belfry Theatre on September 16th. 

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.

This is Part 1 in a four-part series outlining the attack on Canadian charities and the consequences of that attack. Read Part 2, Charities and Self-Censorship: Is Canada Going the Way of the UK?

In testifying before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance to deal with charity provisions in the 2012 Federal Budget, Jamie Ellerton, the Executive Director of Ethical Oil, offered a succinct definition of charity. “If you need to debate whether or not something is charitable,” he told the House, “it is not.”

Ellertonʼs definition of charity, takes 400 years worth of legal debate on the definition of charity, and wraps it up so tightly, makes it so simple, that one would wonder why it ever need be debated at all. If his were the working definition, charitable work would be limited to such tasks as feeding the hungry and planting trees.

Charities would have no say in making change to end hunger or protecting trees that are already standing. They would be mute players, picking up the pieces when government fails to protect the public interest. It is all too clear that the simple definition might be preferred by a government intent on ending conversations – or at least controlling them.

The 2003 Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) policy statement on charities and political activity, CPS-022, was born out of the complexity of the subject matter it deals with. The statement was formulated after years of research, panels and studies to increase both the effectiveness and the accountability of Canadaʼs voluntary sector. It clarified the definition of political activity, and expanded the types of political activities charitable organizations can undertake. The new rules proposed in the 2012 budget once again tightened the restrictions on political activities and gave the Minister of National Revenue new powers to suspend charitable privileges. The government justified these changes in part because of Ethical Oilʼs complaints about various environmental charities engaging in political activity.

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Whatʼs the problem with a charity taking political action? As Ellerton stated in his testimony to the House:

"The main reason why the courts rule out political purposes for charity is, is the result of the requirement that a purpose is only charitable if it generates a public benefit."

If a charitable purpose needs to generate public benefit, what is public benefit, and who decides? In 2012, the Canadaʼs Conservative government looked to its friends at Ethical Oil to decide. If the the Council of Canadians had lodged a complaint against the Fraser Institute on the same basis – would the government have moved to change the regulations on charities and political activities?

What was it about Ethical Oil that launched them into such a privilege position? Perhaps it was the organizationʼs ties to the Conservative Party of Canada – Ellerton, for one, was an aide to Minister Jason Kenney prior to taking the helm at Ethical Oil. Or maybe, the Government was in fact happy to hear from a group of concerned citizens.

The government knows, however, that most Canadians donʼt share Ethical Oilʼs un-critical faith in the oil industry. Recent polling shows that Canadians value environmental sustainability, and would like to see their leaders do more to address problems such as climate change. A poll conducted by Natural Resources Canada expressed Canadian values this way: Foremost, participants saw the Governmentʼs primary role as guarding against negative outcomes or undue environmental or public health impacts of energy sector activity. These relate to activities such as extracting, processing, using and transporting resources. Participants identified actions such as establishing and enforcing regulations and laws and providing oversight.

Public opinion, as Justice Robert Décary stated in the case, Everywomanʼs Healthcare vs. MNR (1988), is a “fragile and volatile concept.” If it were left to the public to decide on the meaning of charity, or whether an act was beneficial to the public, that judgement could well become “a battle between the pollsters.” In his decision, Judge Décary explains that the decision has been one that has been left to the courts, so as to prevent it from becoming a political football. In 2012, the courts were not called to weigh in, and the term public benefit was merely tossed around.

Canadian environmental charities exist for the purpose of promoting the publicʼs interest in a healthy environment. The act of holding the government accountable for environmental protection in the Alberta tar sands, the largest industrial project in human history, is a charitable act. This fact is outlined in CPS-022, and asserted in its preceding document, An Accord Between the Government of Canada and the Voluntary Sector. The Accord states, on page 17:

The independence of voluntary sector organizations includes their right within the law to challenge public policies, programs and legislation and to advocate for change.

In complaining, publicly, about these actions as conducted by Environmental Defense, The David Suzuki Foundation and Tides Canada, Ethical Oil turned the legitimate issue of government accountability into a false debate about the definition of charity. The purpose of these organizations was, and remains, well accepted as a public benefit, but Ethical Oil found a way to make that purpose vulnerable to political attack.

Canadaʼs current government sees its top priority as economic development, and has in the last four years has met more with representatives of the oil and gas industry than members of any other interest group. This government has chosen a strategy of censorship and obfuscation, as opposed to democratic engagement and dialogue.

When it comes to environmental charities, the government has attempted to poison the strong relationship they have with Canadians and create a legal climate which makes acts of environmental protection criminal. Labeling them “foreign radicals” was shocking and absurd, but including them as a potential threat in their Counter Terrorism Strategy? As charity and non-profit lawyer Terrance S. Carter writes in his article, Canadaʼs Counter Terrorism Strategy Targets Environmentalism, it is unclear why environmentalists were singled out or how they are logically connected to white supremacists or other recent examples of domestic terrorism: "Likening environmentalists and animal rights groups to home-grown terrorists and mass murderers raises the question of whether the government is blurring the lines of counter-terrorism in order to target otherwise legitimate opponents and justify questionable surveillance campaigns."

Marco Navarro-Genie, a political scientist from the right-wing think-tank, Frontier Centre, told the Vancouver Sun he was not surprised the government put a halt to some environmental groupʼs “incendiary” influence on the public policy debate.

"There seems to have been a greater deal of sympathy among the public and media for a little bit of the radical edge [of environmentalism]. It seems to be based on the notion that you have to push the envelope to get somewhere. That basically throws out the window any kind of [common sense] conversation about the environment."

Which brings us back to Ethical Oil – the perfect foil in a debate thatʼs been twisted. Healthy democratic debate on any matter of public interest is a good thing. We should welcome the opportunity to discuss the idea of public benefit, and to question the role of charitable organizations in our political landscape – but not as a distraction from other important conversations.

Other countries are debating the meaning of charity as well, and many leaders in Canadaʼs voluntary sector were not satisfied with the 2003 policy changes. They felt the statement hadnʼt done enough to bring Canadian charities freedoms comparable to their counterparts in the US, the UK and elsewhere.

This series will aim to unravel all the complicated threads of what political powers charities have, and what powers charities are barred from, and how the debate over those is playing out elsewhere. We can add to our own conversation, and hopefully find a way forward with a wider perspective.

Image Credit: Jamie Ellerton testifying before the House of Commons Committee.

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This is part three in a series on bad arguments in the Canadian public sphere. The aim of this series is to take a closer look at the soft-serve reasoning employed by public leaders in order to see how they are unconvincing and even harmful to open discourse. Get caught up with part one concerning topic laundering and part two on reductio-ad-villainum. 

The present piece is about ‘carrying a concealed motive.’

Carrying a concealed motive: this species of bad argument hides the goals it wishes to achieve and presents other insincere objectives that are more palatable to the public. It consists of the refusal to be forthcoming about the intentions behind an argument, as though that were immaterial to the debate.

Canadians as a whole frequently have difficulty admitting that they want something – we keep our eyes on the last honey-cruller at the office party and when it’s offered to us we say ‘Oh no, you go ahead and have it’ and a little bit of us dies as the last glazed morsel irrevocably vanishes. In political debate, however, it’s necessary to be clear about what we want in a piece of legislation and how we stand to gain by its passage. 

In politics every decision has some motivation behind it – seeking some benefit or avoiding some detriment. The intention behind a proposal is a genuine and important ground on which to evaluate it. A politician might put forward a well thought out piece of legislation but if it involves a conflict of interest it can and should be struck down. Indeed the ‘conflict of interest’ is one of the most heinous forms of scandal because it involves a betrayal of the public trust. It is crucial to an open and democratic society that the public is aware to what ends its leaders are arguing. 

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Consider the Ethical Oil Institute, a not-for-profit registered by Ezra Levant with Calgary lawyer Thomas Ross. The Ethical Oil Institute runs advertisements about Iran’s human rights record in the hopes of gaining political support for tar sands projects in Alberta where human rights are supposedly respected.

Ezra Levant is a private citizen, free (within reason) to pursue his own chosen ends and to express himself.

He is also someone who has been successfully sued for libel several times and is currently under investigation for hate crimes after his racist comments concerning Romani immigrants to Canada. Whatever Ezra Levant’s and the Ethical Oil Institute's reasons are for promoting tar sands ventures (I assume financial gain and political influence), we can be quite certain that they have little to do with championing human rights. 

Carrying a concealed motive ultimately consists of just saying something in order to get what you want. The motive-concealer has already decided on the end result, they just have to pick the most sympathetic reason to get people go along with it.

Carrying a concealed motive invariably involves a form of hypocrisy. It is not a crime to be a hypocrite but we would do well to not take what hypocrites say very seriously, not without first investigating what they get out of arguing a certain point and what they stand to gain if they get their way. 

Hiding one’s motivations is a form of dishonesty that is inimical to open debate. What holds an open discourse together, what makes it productive, is the sincerity of its participants.

When private citizens try to influence us and our leaders while concealing their motives, we cannot fire them from their lobbying jobs or bring them before a tribunal. But we do not have to be convinced by them – we can make their advertisement spending and their rhetoric pointless by seeing through them.

We need only ask: what do you stand to gain? Establishing a motive is a crucial step in any investigation.

In the face of political insincerity I advocate for scepticism above cynicism. A little scepticism goes a long way in promoting rationality and honesty in the public discourse.

Image Credit: Screen Shot from Ethical Oil Ad.

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This post is Part 2 of the Canada Closed for Debate Series, a four-part exploration of argumentation in Canadian political discourse. For Part 1, click here. Read Part 3, Carrying a Concealed Motive or Part 4, What to do about Bad Arguments?

This is part two of a series on the types of bad arguments frequently found in the Canadian public sphere. The purpose of this series is to provide a taxonomy of demagoguery and to see how these arguments (as put forward by such polarizing campaigns as ‘Ethical Oil’) are harmful to our democracy. The first part concerned topic laundering.

The topic launderer puts a stop to open debate by refusing to answer questions and then changing topic to confuse everyone as to what the debate is really about. This part is about reductio-ad-villainum (reducing your opponent to a villain) in which a peculiar form of libel puts on the cloak of rational argument.

Reductio-ad-Villainum: This style of arguing consists in recasting an opponent’s position to make it look morally bankrupt. It is a curious species of character assassination. You do not have to dig up any dirt on your opponent (that after all requires some research). All you have to do is reframe their position to make the argument itself look dishonourable.

Take the reaction surrounding Thomas Mulcair’s ‘Dutch disease’ argument last May. The leader of the NDP claimed that the Federal government was not enforcing environmental legislation when it came to the Alberta tar sands so that the oil sells cheaper. This over-inflates the worth of the Canadian dollar, which then harms manufacturing exports in other parts of the country (as economists observed in the Netherlands after it found natural gas in the 1960’s). 

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It is a controversial argument that has economists divided, which is all the more reason that it should be debated in parliament, especially after the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) released a report finding that the Harper government’s policies are creating an uneven economy across the provinces.

What response did Mulcair receive?

A chorus of conservative MPs claiming that he was trying to pit the West and the rest of the country against each other. What this response boils down to is that the ‘Dutch disease’ argument is not good because it makes Canadians dislike each other. This isn’t very likely to convince anyone once the veil is pierced.

The MPs no doubt wished to vilify Mulcair but what is especially sinister is that they vilified the argument itself. This fine specimen of the reductio-ad-villainum creates an easy talking point so that anyone who subscribes to the Dutch Disease hypothesis can be accused of hating Albertans. Anyone who rejects the hypothesis is a defender of the prairies.

We go from having a situation where we can debate the causes of manufacturing decline and natural resource development to a situation where anyone who makes the villainous claim is trying to divide the country against itself. Although, it's not likely that advocating strict enforcement of environmental regulations on tar sands development will lead to our nation's first civil war.

The reductio-ad-villainum consists in making an opponent’s argument sound as though it were mean-spirited and then rejecting it on moral grounds. By parodying a rational argument and providing a sound bite, this style of argument appeals to what is worst in us: we get to ignore an opposing argument while feeling a sense of moral superiority.

This bad argument does not foster debate; it shuts debate down.

It is bad for our democracy – it drags down the level of discourse and makes people afraid of holding an opinion after it has been slandered.  The reductio-ad-villainum is a way of silencing an argument rather than a person. It has been used time and again concerning the tar sands by the Conservative government and the Ethical Oil campaign so that, instead of discussing the environmental and economic impact of the oil industry openly and honestly in parliament, most MPs hold their tongues for fear of alienating voters in resource rich provinces.

We have lost sight of the goal of open debate: to get at the truth, not to win at all costs.

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.