Canadian conservative commentator and climate science denialist Ezra Levant has won his battle with the United Nations to have staff from his media outlet accredited  to cover climate talks starting next week in Morocco.

Three staffers from Levant’s online outlet, The Rebel, were initially denied media accreditation for the COP22 talks in Marrakesh, after the UN described Rebel as “advocacy media”. The Financial Post is reporting that the UN has granted Rebel two spots, but Rebel is pushing back for a third.

Since hearing from the UN in early October, Levant has been campaigning furiously to force the UN to change its mind.  He gained support from three journalism groups, gathered 10,000 names on a petition and won the backing of Canada's environment minister, Catherine McKenna.

Levant even travelled to New York to hand the petition to Canada’s permanent mission to the United Nations.

But along the way, Levant has repeatedly shown footage from the last major climate change talks in Paris to bolster his case. Levant says the footage shows journalists in the Paris media room “jumping for joy”. This, according to Levant, shows their lack of objectivity and just why his "real journalists" should be allowed inside the COP22 talks as media. 

But DeSmog has investigated the origins of the clip and can confirm that the footage does not show journalists and was not filmed in “the media room”, as Levant has repeatedly claimed.

The clip was originally filmed and shared on Twitter by a passing journalist  — Miranda Johnson, of The Economist — who has confirmed Rebel did not seek permission to use her footage and, if it had, it would have been refused. 

WE HAVE A #ParisAgreement pic.twitter.com/Xh7HSPWXSD

— Miranda Johnson (@MSLJeconomist) December 12, 2015

Instead, the clip shows a side room, well away from the media centre, where civil society groups who had campaigned for action on climate change for years had gathered to watch the final moments of the Paris talks.

Levant has told viewers: “Here’s a clip from the UN global warming convention last year showing journalists in the press room cheering.”

In another Rebel video, Levant says: “The most striking video clip of the entire Paris conference last year was when an international agreement was finally announced and the media room burst into applause and cheering. Some actually jumping for joy – you know, the way objective reporters do.”

DeSmog can also confirm the person seen “jumping for joy” was not a journalist either, but a media liaison officer for a climate action group.

Other media outlets have asked for permission to use Johnson's footage, including US outlet Fox News, but all have been refused.

Levant has used the footage at least five times in at least four different videos posted on YouTube and his Rebel media website. Each time, Levant says it shows journalists in the media room.

In a segment with one of his formerly “banned” staff members, Sheila Gunn Reid, Levant says the UN is “terrified that we will turn the camera on the UN approved journalists… the pets.”

He adds:  “We can’t show this enough.  I want to show the clip of the official approved accredited journalists, who are more objective than you Sheila, jumping for joy at some climate announcement…. That’s the media filing room. That’s the press room. Every person in that room was a journalist that met [the UN officer] Nick Nuttall’s standards.”

As well as using the footage to gain support from the public, Levant also uses the clip to support a crowdfunding campaign to send Rebel staff to cover a different UN conference in India later this month. In that video, Levant again describes the “reporters” in the footage as “squealing like teenagers at a Justin Bieber concert.”

DeSmog has approached Levant for comment.

Rebel is currently crowfunding its trip to Marrakech.

Rebel writes: "One thing we won’t scrimp on is security, though — especially in a place like Morocco. So we need a driver/handler to make sure we get to and from the conference site each day safely." This, despite visitors to COP22 having access to official shuttle buses running 12 routes, each route covered from 6am until midnight and, in peak hours, running every 15 minutes.

Levant is trying to raise more than CA$27,000 for the India trip, including $14,000 to hire a private security firm. And The Rebel is crowdfunding for Morocco as well.

DeSmog has reported that Rebel’s intentions in Morocco were not to mainly report on the proceedings, but instead to film journalists.

Levant told an audience that Rebel had joined with climate science denier Marc Morano, of the US-based Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), who Levant appointed an “honorary Rebel” at the talks.

CFACT, which has received funding from fossil fuel interests, has been accredited as a non-governmental organisation at several UN climate summits.

According to a CFACT Facebook post, “Rebel wanted to join CFACT at the UN climate conference in Marrakech."

One of the three Rebel staff members heading to Morocco, Sheila Gunn Reid, told an Edmonton audience in September 2016 that “people who believe in global warming really seem like a doomsday cult.”  

Main image: Ezra Levant. Credit: University of Saskatchewan/Flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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Conservative Canadian broadcaster Ezra Levant is appealing to the public and his prime minister to intervene in a row with organisers of the upcoming United Nations climate conference.

Levant wanted to send three staff members from his “The Rebel” media company to the COP22 talks taking place next month in Marrakech, Morocco.

The Rebel had applied to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change for media accreditation but, according to screenshots shared by Levant, the UN has declined the application because “advocacy media outlets do not qualify for media accreditation.”

DeSmog can reveal that Levant’s crew intended to film other journalists at press conferences and outside the venue, in an apparent attempt to expose what Levant thinks is a hypocritical media.

At a Rebel event in Edmonton in September, U.S.-based climate science denialist Marc Morano, who would be an "honorary Rebel journalist" in Morocco, told an audience member he intends to “put on a disguise” at the conference.

Levant has appealed for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to intervene in the “ban” and has support from three Canadian journalism associations, which may not agree with Levant’s politics, but also don’t condone the UN’s decision. Levant has also started an online petition and had his lawyers send a legal letter to the UN.

The three journalists whose applications were declined are reportedly Rebel’s Alberta bureau chief Sheila Gunn Reid, producer Meaghan MacSween and cameraman Alex Jones.

But what was The Rebel going to do in Morocco?  Was it there to report the proceedings, or something else?

In September, Levant’s The Rebel hosted a public screening of Marc Morano's climate science denial film “Climate Hustle” in Edmonton.

In audio recorded by a DeSmog researcher in attendance, Levant tells the audience that “we will be asking questions and turning the camera around to show the other journalists,” in an apparent attempt to ridicule reporters who he describes as “cheerleaders” for the UN.

During a Q&A session following the Climate Hustle screening, Levant says that Marc Morano will be an “honorary Rebel journalist” in Morocco. Morano is Communications Director of the US “think tank” Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, which has received funding from Exxon in the past. (Morano has received official credentials alongside CFACT colleagues for several UN climate conferences, including Paris, Lima and Warsaw.)

Answering questions later, Morano told one audience member that he would “put on a disguise” to avoid being recognised in Morocco.

"We're just going there to expose them … They're not gonna expect us to be there … They might recognize me, but … I'll put on a disguise," Morano says. 

He also tells the audience member that "we could still film them and I could give a lot of questions for them to ask as well, so … there will be a lot of opportunities at this thing," although it is not clear if he is referring directly to Rebel staff.

Fascist Science Guy?

Ezra Levant tells the audience in Edmonton: “[inaudible].. to show the contrast of how they say ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ while their limos idle outside. While they say ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ while dining in five-star restaurants.”

When answering questions, Rebel’s Gunn Reid referred to US science broadcaster Bill Nye as “Bill Nye the fascist science guy.” 

Later, she told the audience: “These people who believe in global warming really seem like a doomsday cult and I think that’s what’s driving the urgency for them.”

“Eventually, after all the predictions fail, the people in the white pajamas waiting for the comet to come are going to figure out that the comet is never coming.”

DeSmog has asked the UNFCCC for a response to The Rebel's protest. DeSmog has also approached Marc Morano and Ezra Levant for comment.

In a legal letter sent to the UN, Rebel Media's lawyers write: "The denial of accreditation to representatives from The Rebel fundamentally denies not only The Rebel from following facts and opinions on the subject of climate change to be expressed, but it also denies the opportunity of Canadians and others to receive those views through the media."

Main image: Ezra Levant. Credit: Flickr/University of Saskatchewan CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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We’re only a minute into watching a brief low-budget video — one that begins by alleging U.S. President Barack Obama is a bully because he suggests that climate change deniers should be “called out” — when Ezra Levant sits down in the chair next to me.

The Rebel Commander himself.

According to organizers, he’s the reason attendance of tonight’s $45-per-head fundraiser in Calgary — casually titled “Climate Leadership Catastrophe: Carbon Taxes, Job Loss, Freedoms Denied” and organized by the so-called “Friends of Science” — spiked from 200 to 445 people after he was announced as its keynote speaker.

And he’s the same intensely controversial pundit who I met in late November at another Calgary event called “Generation Screwed” which I covered for Vice Canada while wearing a “Dreamy Trudeau” sweater.

“Hey James,” he says, reaching out his hand to shake mine.

We briefly chat as the video moves on to clips of testimonies from human-caused climate change denying scientists like Roy Spencer and Willie Soon (the latter took $1.25 million from fossil fuel companies and lobby groups for his research). Levant relays a hilarious and self-deprecating story to me about his flight from Toronto to Calgary during which another person fell asleep on him.

I scribble a few observations in a notepad. He scrolls through his phone, probably Twitter mentions given he sports almost 50,000 followers.

After a few minutes he gets up to leave. I remind him that I tweeted at him a while back about how the Alberta NDP was elected on Karl Marx’s birthday, which seems like crucial information to include in his vehemently anti-NDP and pro-capitalist online show.

We opt to “follow” each other on Twitter. He wanders off.

The whole interaction seemed tense. But also, well, profound; Levant has a disposition that makes one feel strangely a part of something, even if you’re ideologically opposed to him.

It’s awfully disconcerting.

Little has happened in the interim. The slides that greeted each attendee as they walked in and had their tickets scanned by an enthused 15-year-old boy before moving to the buffet tables set the tone for the evening: “Say No To Climate Co2ercion,” “$WINDle,” “Climate — Change Your Mind.”

The video, itself backgrounded with close-up shots of the stars of the American flag, features a bizarre graduation of presumed rights from “freedom of thought,” to “freedom of rational dissent” to “freedom to expose the 97 per cent consensus propaganda.”

Such pun-inspired sayings seem hokey at best. But as the remainder of the night proves, dismissing such sloganeering is as dangerous as ignoring what makes Levant a genuinely enjoyable human to interact with.

For denial of human-caused climate change has very little to do with facts or data (which is why they can argue that CO2 has nothing to do with increased average temperatures and, minutes later, point out that forest fires produce far more emissions than human activity which seems to acknowledge the relevance of CO2 to the discussion).

Many climate change psychologists have observed that one’s views on the issue depend heavily on factors such as in-group biases, pre-existing political leanings and personal connections to carbon-intensive lifestyles.

As a result, it seems deeply naive to chalk the existence of groups like Friends of Science up to a lack of info. Pushing facts like the 97 per cent tidbit will likely only further alienate this kind of audience, fostering a martyr complex.

Take the night’s first presentation. The speaker, John Harper, has worked as a petroleum geologist for the likes of ConocoPhillips and Shell Canada. It’s unclear why he was picked as the person to deliver the technical lecture as opposed to, say, an actual atmospheric or climate scientist.

“What are the rocks telling us?” serves as his mantra for the talk, despite the fact the Geological Society of America agrees that “human activities … are the dominant cause of the rapid warming since the middle 1900s.”

The levels of carbon as measured by parts per million are nothing compared to previous eons, he says, “and the earth is still here” (a curious notion given there’s no way humans could exist in such conditions). He suggests global warming is inevitable. The real problems are population growth and human excrement. Blame the sun.

The trap that believers in human-caused climate change fall into is they rely on interpretation instead of actual assessment of the data, Harper says; he doesn’t know what politicians pushing for policy to address climate change even mean by “evidence-based.”

This statement is made entirely unironically.

Most attendees seem fairly disinterested. Ringtones keep going off.

The only truly captivating part of the entire presentation is an illegible graphic that spastically bounces up and down to demonstrate the fluctuations in average temperatures across the millennia.

The science presented is near impossible to follow.

But it doesn’t matter what Harper says. The point isn’t that he says the right things but that he is the right person: someone who the crowd can trust (former director of energy at the Geological Survey of Canada) and presenting in the right place (after a tasty meal and while sitting among people who look and think like you).

Levant — the star of the event — is announced as someone who’s been deemed by various publications as the “most irritating” and “talking head you’d most like to silence.” Each “achievement” is greeted with a raucous applause. The emcee, Michelle Sterling, clarifies that “I didn’t write this, by the way, they gave this to me.”

Of course she didn’t. Levant is a perfectly composed character. It’s very tricky to discern what he actually believes and what he plays up for a profit.

Either way, his intro as a “rebel” perfectly serves his cause: he’s an iconoclast representing the few who refuse to believe in human-caused climate change (just because a vast majority of scientists happen to).

Levant has no specific focus in his sermons. There’s certainly a thematic goal though: building a staggeringly convincing enemy-oriented narrative by pointing out the hypocrisy, insensitivity and alleged anti-Albertan nature of government and environmental organizations.

In the span of half-hour, he hops from slamming Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi for the Uber debacle, to ridiculing hemp rope bags, to noting that forest fires are natural, to linking environmental efforts with energy poverty, degrowth and deindustrialization (which inevitably led to a Unabomber comparison), to charting foreign donations to Canadian environmental non-profits.

Anyone who has seen Levant speak before knows the drill.

A standing ovation serves as a brief punctuation between his speech and Q&A session. Two mid-life-crisis-aged men in the washroom exchange thoughts about how “our governments are crazy,” “they’re a waste of our time and the country’s time” and how “Ralph Klein’s sacrifice” is being forgotten.

Levant’s responses to questions from the audience such as “why can’t Albertans oust the NDP?” and “why won’t governments stand up for Canada” hones in on hyper-specifics. The mainstream environmental movement’s take on GMOs is ridiculed. We’re made of carbon, we eat carbon, we exhale carbon.

He makes a fart joke (“I buy carbon credits for when I toot”). The “dairy cartel” isn’t taxed as the oil industry is even though its product — cattle — emit massive amounts of methane.

Et cetera.

It’s a spellbinding performance. The crowd occasionally responds to Levant with applause and to the targeted enemies with boos (for an ostensibly tax-averse crowd, they take the reduction of the province’s firefighting budget very, very seriously). The energy in the room can be described as nothing less than spiritual in nature.

There’s an unshakable sense of unity and drive, which likely has something to do with the fact everyone’s: a) white; b) rich; and c) feel persecuted by people concerned about climate change.

But it’s a force that must be acknowledged by climate change activists.

It’s not enough to dismiss Levant and the so-called Friends of Science as fringe groups that simply misconstrue data and graphs and decontextualized policy decisions to suit their mandates.

Of course, they do indeed do that. But such entities also tap into very powerful and deep-seated emotions — trust and pride, anxiety and anger, hyper-awareness of environmentalists who also fly around the world in private jets.

Good luck beating those back with facts. 

Image: The Rebel/Facebook

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Ezra Levant is at it again. Only this time we aren’t rolling our eyes and quickly closing the Internet browser. No, this time we actually agree with him. Hear us out.

Last week Levant’s right-wing online news and opinion outlet The Rebel complained to the Alberta premier’s office about three incidents where Rebel staff were allegedly barred from government events. In its response last Friday, the government defended its policy.

“Our client’s position remains that your client (The Rebel) and those who identify as being connected to (The Rebel) are not journalists and are not entitled to access media lock-ups or other such events,” read a response from an Alberta Ministry of Justice lawyer, posted by The Rebel.

After a few days of outrage, the Alberta government lifted its ban on reporters from The Rebel.

“We’ve heard a lot of feedback from Albertans and media over the course of the last two days and it’s clear we made a mistake,” the premier’s office said in a statement.

While his “reckless disregard for the truth” and bigotry don’t make Levant the best crusader for press freedom, he’s right to argue that the Alberta government should not be in the game of determining who is and who is not a journalist. That opens the door to the government or press gallery of the day to disallow journalists it disagrees with.

The whole affair strikes a chord with us because DeSmog Canada has been on the receiving end of the same kind of treatment here in B.C. — stuck in the middle of a shifting debate about what constitutes a “media outlet” or a “journalist.”

Who Has The Right to Access B.C. Press Gallery?

It first happened on Dec. 16, 2014, the day the B.C. government held a press briefing on its final investment decision on the Site C hydroelectric dam. DeSmog Canada had published dozens of articles on the proposed dam, including a 12-part investigative series.

We were unable to gain access to that press conference and were provided with the following explanation by Tom Fletcher, president of the legislative press gallery:  “It was not the press gallery executive’s decision to refuse you entry. Legislature security determined that your organization is not a media outlet for the purposes of issuing press credentials for restricted areas.”

I was surprised to hear that security guards are now responsible for determining which organizations qualify as media outlets — since this is a decision typically made by the press gallery itself.

I wrote back asking if the decision would be re-visited and told Fletcher:

“Myself (and DeSmog for that matter) has an exemplary track record. In 2011, Time Magazine named us one of the Top 25 blogs of the year and we were the first online media organization to be accredited by the United Nations to attend international climate negotiations. I have personally worked as a journalist at the Calgary Sun, Calgary Herald, Cambridge Evening News and BBC Essex. We may not be part of the traditional media, but we are most certainly part of the burgeoning new media world.”

No response.

Next, I followed up with security.

Randall Ennis, the deputy sergeant at arms, quickly replied, with this explanation: “We did attempt to contact the Legislative press gallery president (Tom Fletcher) on your behalf to ascertain if he recognized you as a journalist, however were unsuccessful in contacting Tom until after the event.”

Ennis provided the following advice:

“Emma, for the future on the occasions you’d like to attend the Legislature for press conferences, I suggest that you contact the press gallery president (Tom Fletcher) in advance and make him aware of your intentions and request Tom advise the Legislative Assembly Protective Service (LAPS). This procedure works well and is used by other visiting journalists.”

That sounded perfectly reasonable to me and I could see how, in the hustle-bustle of the day, a misunderstanding might have prevented me from gaining access to the press conference. Had I realized it would be an issue, I would have made arrangements in advance.

Fast forward to March 2015, when DeSmog Canada published an exclusive in-depth interview with Harry Swain, the man who chaired the joint federal-provincial panel tasked with reviewing the Site C dam. The comments he made to us were being debated during Question Period, so I contacted Fletcher about attending.

Fletcher’s response: “I’ll contact them and ask them to give you a guest media pass for today, although I am inclined to agree with their initial assessment that Desmog is an advocacy organization and not a media outlet.”

So, there it was again — who gets to decide who is and who is not a journalist? It’s long been thought that the people best positioned to make that decision were the journalists themselves. However, our situation raises questions about that procedure.

It should be noted that Fletcher frequently publishes columns that promote denial of climate change and his company Black Press is owned by the same David Black who is proposing to build an oil refinery in Kitimat. So it’s safe to say he’s not a huge fan of DeSmog’s work.

And therein lies the risk in allowing a press gallery president or the government to decide whose work qualifies as journalism. What is journalism to some is advocacy to others and vice versa.

Sean Holman, journalism professor at Mount Royal University and former member of the B.C. press gallery, says determining what constitutes a journalist nowadays is incredibly complex.

“I think it’s a difficult question to answer and it is becoming more and more difficult as we see the collapse of legacy media and the growth of activist media that is picking up the jobs that journalists are no longer able to do,” Holman said.

On my way out of the press gallery last March, I noted the press gallery photos hanging on the wall. They started in 1912, the groups expanding over years, until they started into a perilous decline, leading to today’s state of affairs where there are often only a handful of reporters at the legislature.

Given the dwindling numbers, you’d think new members would be welcomed so long as they conduct themselves professionally and in the public interest. Wouldn’t it be a pleasant problem if too many bloggers/journalists/whatevers were to show up to report on happenings at the B.C. legislature?

Holman argues that journalists enjoy the rights and privileges they do because they act as proxies for the public, asking questions of officials and keeping the public informed.

“In the absence of traditional newsrooms, we are going to need organizations and people who are willing to hold public institutions and officials to account in the public interest,” Holman said. “And so long as they are doing that function, why exactly should they enjoy rights and privileges that are any less than that of a journalist?”

In terms of who should make the call on whether someone is working in the “public interest,” there’s no perfect answer.

“The question is: who has the right to make that decision? Is it government? Is it journalists? It strikes me that there are problems with both parties making that determination,” Holman said.

And voila, this is where the democratizing force of social media comes into play. In the old world, the powers that be could sit pretty and make these determinations quietly in a musty room.

Now, however, no one owns the means of distribution. And a disgruntled party, like Levant, can take his case online, putting the power into the public’s hands — and we’ve all seen how that works out.

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The days of infinite growth in Alberta’s oilsands are over with the Alberta government’s blockbuster climate change announcement on Sunday, which attracted broad support from industry and civil society.

“This is the day that we start to mobilize capital and resources to create green jobs, green energy, green infrastructure and a strong, environmentally responsible, sustainable and visionary Alberta energy industry with a great future,” Premier Rachel Notley said. “This is the day we stop denying there is an issue, and this is the day we do our part.”

Notley and Environment & Parks Minister Shannon Phillips released a 97-page climate change policy plan, which includes five key pillars.

1) Carbon will be priced economy-wide at $30/tonne by 2018.

2) Coal-fired power plants will be phased out by 2030.

3) Oilsands emissions will be capped at 100 megatonnes (Mt) per year (recent Environment Canada figures predicted a 2020 output of 103 Mt from the sector), which amounts to allowing current construction to go ahead, but that’s it. That means to expand production beyond current projects, per barrel emissions will need to be reduced.

4) Methane emissions from oil and gas operations will be cut by 45 per cent in 2025.

5) 30 per cent of all electricity will be generated by renewables by 2030.

It is a staggeringly significant proposal, one that far surpasses anything the former Progressive Conservative government imagined in the course of its 43-year reign. The announcement — delivered at Edmonton’s Telus World of Science — was benefitted by appearances from CEOs of Suncor, Canadian Natural Resource Ltd. (CNRL), Shell and Cenovus, something far-right activist Ezra Levant dismissed by alleging the massive energy companies “don't represent the industry.”

Environmental groups such as the Pembina Institute and Clean Energy Canada were also on stage. Getting all of those players in support of one climate strategy is a huge testament to the leadership of University of Alberta energy economist Andrew Leach, who chaired the climate change panel.

Climate Change Policy Plan Garners Broad Support

With the exception of the rabidly conservative Wildrose Party and former deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk, it seemed every serious player in politics and industry celebrated the announcement. The NDP-affiliated Broadbent Institute, headquartered in Toronto, concluded: “On a public policy Richter scale, Alberta’s new Climate Leadership Plan is an 11.”

Shell Canada announced that “these measures provide predictability and certainty and will help ensure that producers can responsibly develop and grow this significant Canadian resource while also addressing global concerns about climate change.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau congratulated Notley in a tweet now favourited over 1,300 times as “a very positive step in the fight against climate change.”  Political blogger Dave Cournoyer accurately dubbed it a “pigs fly” situation.

All of this means a whole lot given the impending Paris Climate Change Conference (COP 21).

Canada ranks 15th out of 17th countries for greenhouse gas emissions according to the Conference Board of Canada, with Alberta contributing 36 per cent of national emissions in 2013 despite only accounting for 11 per cent of the country’s population.

The expected spike in oilsands expansion was widely expected to nullify all other sources of emissions reductions in the Canada. The fact that Alberta, and by extension Canada, is now going into COP 21 with a detailed plan to address the province’s largest source of emissions – oilsands development and coal-fired power plants – speaks volumes about the desire to be taken seriously on the world stage.

Climate Plan May Increase Social Licence for Oilsands Operations

Another component that ostensibly drove oil execs to hop on the green bandwagon was the need to accrue “social licence,” or the support required to build pipelines to export its products. The veto of TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline represents what happens when such social licence isn’t secured.

By addressing runaway emissions, Alberta-based companies might actually stand a chance to build infrastructure like the Energy East pipeline, which would transport 1.1 million barrels of diluted bitumen from Alberta to Quebec and New Brunswick every day.

“The province’s climate strategy may allow our sector to invest more aggressively in technologies to further reduce per barrel emissions in our sector and do our part to tackle climate change,” said Tim McMillan, Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers’ president and chief executive officer, in a statement.

“We encourage the province to follow a balanced approach, recognizing that our sector can only become a global supplier of responsibly produced oil and natural gas if we are competitive on the world stage.”

The fight over pipelines is unlikely to dissipate. While Sunday’s announcement was a giant step in the right direction, it’s still not enough to avoid catastrophic global warming, according to a statement from Greenpeace.

“These policies are important first steps, but much bigger emission reductions will be needed for Alberta to do its part to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius,” Alberta climate and energy campaigner Mike Hudema said.

Hudema also noted that the province still has no short or long-term emission reduction targets.

“Targets give an important signal to business, let the world know where Alberta is headed, and help ensure that direction leads to the reductions that science and equity demand,” he said.

The Pembina Institute has historically supported a higher carbon tax than what was proposed on Sunday – with $40/tonne in 2016, $50/tonne in 2017 and $60/tonne in 2018 — but the plan is an indisputably major upgrade from the Specified Gas Emitters Regulation (SGER), which taxed Alberta’s largest emitters (103 at last count) at the equivalent of $1.80/tonne.

George Hoberg, professor in the forest department at the University of British Columbia, notes there’s still plenty of work to be done but that: “Today is a day for celebration. Alberta has bent its carbon emissions curve, and provided a lever to Canada to show real climate leadership.”

Ultimately, the future of Canada’s environmental reputation may rely on the work that Trudeau and Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna complete during and after the Paris conference. But Sunday’s announcement out of Alberta sets quite the standard.

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Sun News went dark Friday, not with a bang but a whimper.

The Sun News television channel faded to black at 5 a.m. eastern time with no on-air announcement, the screen simply reading, “Sun News Network is no longer available, at the discretion of the programmer. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope you will continue to value all the channels included in your package.”

The network, which has been at the centre of much controversy since its inception in 2011, provided right-leaning news and opinion in the style of the U.S.'s Fox News, earning the nickname “Fox News North.”

Faced with annual losses of $20 million and with no new buyers on the horizon, “there was no alternative to closing Sun News,” a Sun Media Corp. press release said. In October 2014 Postmedia News purchased Sun News papers but declined to purchase the television channel. 

Julie Tremblay, president and CEO of Media Groups and Sun Media Corporation, said: “This is an unfortunate outcome; shutting down Sun News was certainly not our goal.”

“Over the past four years, we tried everything we could to achieve sufficient market penetration to generate the profits needed to operate a national news channel. Sadly, the numerous obstacles to carriage that we encountered spelled the end of this venture.”

In 2013 the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) ruled the network did not meet the criteria necessary for mandatory coverage on basic cable in Canada.

Tremblay said “the closure is regrettable for the Canadian broadcasting system, which is losing a distinctively Canadian voice in the national news space.”

Responses to the network’s demise have been varied.

Members of the media took to Twitter to express their condolences to Sun News journalists. Others took the opportunity to disparage the outlet.

Liberal commentator and author Warren Kinsella wrote in a mournful blog post about the death of traditional media and how the Sun News Network – as disagreeable as it was – played a role in lively debate.

“In case you haven’t noticed,” he wrote, “our traditional new media are dying.”

“When that journalism disappears, mark my words: our democracy will be diminished, and possibly even in peril. I’m not exaggerating. There is nothing that keeps the powerful in check – not Question Period, not a public opinion poll, not even the policy – as effectively as journalists do. I’ve worked on both sides, and I know, I’ve seen it: every time a newspaper dies – every time a TV network dies – the powerful grow more so. You may think that’s okay, but I sure don’t. They are not always benign in the way they exercise power.”

Writer Omar Mouallem, however, had a different perspective on the network’s closure.

“Everyone at Sun News deserved to be fired,” he wrote on Canadaland’s website. “They were complicit in spewing hatred.”

Mouallem noted that many Canadian journalists were deferential in their goodbyes to Sun News, engaging in “back-patting.”

“It doesn’t matter how many people lost their jobs or how many young and talented journalists Sun News Network took a chance on,” Mouallem argued. The network’s “bigotry is well known and well documented. The network promoted racism – against Arabs, against Romani people, against First Nations – under the veil of ‘opinion,’ a disgraceful abuse of the latitude that is afforded to news commentary and columnizing.”

The network provided a platform for commentators like Ezra Levant, founder of EthicalOil.org. Levant, host of The Source, was perhaps the network’s most notable provocateur.

Writing for The Walrus Jonathan Kay notes Levant's sensational views on race, religion, environmentalism and politics did not represent the entire network. 

"One hundred seventy-five people worked at Sun News Network," he wrote. "One hundred seventy-four of those people were not named Ezra Levant. So even Canada’s leftists would do well to keep their schadenfreude in check. The majority of Sun’s staffers were apolitical twenty- or thirty-somethings looking to eke out a career in television. They were not mini-Ezras, and many likely will never find another job in journalism. If you find this to be reason for celebration, you’re a bad person."

Kay added that because Canadians do not display U.S.-style outrage over immigration, abortion and gay rights, Sun News Network was doomed from the start.

"The U.S. has a culture war. Here, we have question period."

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If Canada is to seriously confront its addiction to fossil fuels and fight climate change, we need to reframe the entire debate.

That's the message a group of protesters aimed to send when they occupied and disrupted a conference at Montreal's McGill University on Friday.

At 7:45 a.m., about 30 people entered the prestigious McGill Faculty Club where the second day of Petrocultures, a conference organized by the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada (MISC), was to take place. Instead, the conference was forced to start an hour and a half late. While most of the day's events still went ahead at the new location, the protesters saw the action — which was tied to a banner drop — as a success.

"Every slowdown of this kind of conference helps," said Mona Luxion, a McGill student and spokesperson for the occupiers, in an interview with DeSmog.

At first glance, the conference isn't an obvious target for environmental activists. While featuring several pro-oil speakers, including an oil company vice-president and the former head of the Oilsands Developers Group, the conference appeared to lean towards voices critical of fossil fuel extraction, including an Indigenous anti-oilsands activist, prominent environmentalists, and academics and artists critical of the fossil fuel industry.

But while the conference featured critics of the oilsands, a promotional video for the event featured co-chair Dr. Will Straw saying the goal of the conference was to cover all sides: "It would be very easy to have a conference on this subject that would bring together everybody who's on the same side: hard core environmentalists, anti-oil people, and so on. But we do want all sides to be heard," he said in the video produced by TV McGill.

It's this kind of false equivalency between the two sides of the fossil fuel debate that's dangerous, said Luxion. "Debate can be productive…But a debate that puts support for the tar sands as equal [to criticisms of the fossil fuel industry] isn't the debate we need to be having."

The negative impacts of the fossil fuel industry — from higher rates of cancers in First Nations communities living downstream from the oilsands, to the growing catastrophic impacts of climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions — are well documented, Luxion said.

Instead, the occupiers argue there is an urgent need to discuss how we end our dependency on fossil fuels, and how to stop the promotion of the fossil fuel industry.

Co-chair Dr. Will Straw told DeSmog he agrees not all sides of a debate are equal, and said McGill attempted to give more space to fossil fuel critics.

"We didn't look for a balanced conference. One side already has more access to the media," he said, referencing the oil and gas industry. He also stressed that by holding the conference on campus and reducing the entry fee (in the past, McGill Institue for the Study of Canada) conferences have been held at hotels with hefty $400 registration fees), there was a much broader student and community participation.

Even with greater participation, the conference's mandate to "discuss and debate the role of oil and energy in shaping social, cultural and political life in Canada at present and in the future" still served to reinforce the status quo, said Luxion.

The protesters voiced an additional concern that invited representatives from the environmental movement weren't challenging the status quo aggressively enough. 

In a written statement, the occupiers were specific in their concerns:

"To whom does Petrocultures offer a stage? Beyond outright promoters of the tar sands and fracking: a co-founder of ForestEthics, which advocates for 'responsible industry,' a co-founder of Équiterre, which urges 'responsible consumption,' and the president of the International Institute for Sustainable Development, which campaigns to achieve 'green growth.' The common thread uniting these speakers is a commitment to making moderate adjustments to life under capitalism, adjustments which serve to extend the lifespan of an inherently violent system without abolishing it."

Steven Guilbeault of Montreal-based Equiterre was invited to speak at the conference, on a panel with Tzeporah Berman of ForestEthics, and Sun News personality and oilsands proponent Ezra Levant.

While Guilbeault agreed the debate around fossil fuels is in need of being reframed, he feels the necessary discussions on how to combat climate change are happening in the environmental movement, and that Équiterre and its allies have seen successes.

"I often debate with myself and others on what we need to do to be more effective; how do we become more radical, more effective, more inclusive," he said. The debate is shifting, he argued, pointing to 50,000 people out last year for a march in Montreal against fossil fuels, and 300,000 coming out for Earth Day in 2012, at the height of the Quebec student strike.

But Luxion says the protesters want a stronger challenge of current economic frames: "Our concern specifically was that that the people who are proposed as opponents don't veer too far from capitalism…They aren't talking about decolonizaton or about changes to our economic model."

Also reached for comment, Levant, who contends that Canadian oil is more ethical than oil imported from countries like Saudi Arabia, agreed that the debate around oil in Canada needs to be framed differently, although to different ends.

"Right now the framing of it is: imperfect oilsands oil versus the fantasy fuel of the future that's perfect in every way (except it doesn't exist yet)," he wrote. "I'm trying to reframe the debate towards real-life choices: ethical oil from Canada versus conflict oil from OPEC."

The ethical oil argument, however, fails to address the problematic aspects of oil development in Canada, leaving the important questions unaddressed. Ethicaloil.org has deep ties to the oil and gas industry and the Conservative party.

Levant's presence at the conference became a lightening rod for criticism. Straw said if he was to redo the conference, he may not have invited the controversial pundit. Guilbeault said Levant's presence served to reduce the credibility of the event.

For Luxion and other occupiers, though, the mere presence of Levant wasn't what made the conference more problematic. Rather, it's that the discussion continues to reflect a status quo that places pro- and anti-fossil fuel positions on the same footing, a status quo which is also reflected prominently in mainstream media and Canadian politics.

"The fact that all the federal parties support fossil fuel extraction to a degree points to the fact the debate is about how to exploit oil and gas, and not whether or not we should," said Luxion.

* Correction Notice: This article originally stated that the Petrocultures Conference was forced to change venues. That was not the case.

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It was more than a little convenient to hear right-wing commentator Ezra Levant recently deliver his latest public apology, just in time for the start today of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CTRC) hearings into his Sun News Network’s application for “mandatory carriage.”

A favorable ruling by the regulator would put Levant in every Canadian home with a basic cable package and $18 million a year in the pockets of Sun Media. That might be good news for Levant and Sun Media parent Quebecor Inc, but for Canadians looking for unpolluted public discourse, not so much. What’s more, in return for rescuing Sun media from the red ink, Canadian subscribers would get an increase in cable rates.

Levant likes to make headlines, even when most of them are unflattering. The last one in March was to Canada’s Roma community, following a racist rant he gave on his Sun News Network show The Source in September, during which he described the community as “gypsies, a culture synonymous with swindlers” that have come to Canada as “to gyp us again and rob us blind as they have done in Europe for centuries.”

The network apologized two weeks later but Levant’s took until mid-March, on the eve of the CRTC hearings. The network’s vice-president, Kory Teneycke, recently told CBC Radio he didn’t think Levant’s “intent was racist” and that the man he’s known for 20 years has “no hatred in his heart.”

While the CRTC considers the mandatory coverage request, we at DeSmog Canada think it’s a good time to discuss the social value of such reckless commentary on Canada’s airwaves. While some may argue the right to free speech, any good lawyer will tell you that free speech does not entitle you to libel people or to fabricate information, even if it’s your on-air shtick is to shake things up.

Levant has a history of being censured or sanctioned for defamatory statements and falsehoods. He is also guilty of distorting and inventing facts, defaming people and failing to exercise the diligence required of a responsible “journalist.”

In 2010, he was forced to apologize and retract comments he made in a Sun Media column accusing American billionaire George Soros of collaborating with Nazis as a child in Hungary. Sun Media later issued a retraction and apology. In 2011, Levant accused Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi of “anti-Christian bigotry” for calling an end to a preacher-led protest. That same year, Levant violated the Canadian Broadcasting Standards Council’s ethical guidelines with an on-air diatribe leveled at Chiquita Bananas, after the company announced it would avoid using fuel derived from Alberta’s oil sands. Addressing an executive of Chiquita Brands International, Levant said, “Hey, you. Yeah you . . .Chinga tu madre [Fuck your mother].”

His pro-oil industry lobby group, the Ethical Oil Institute, was also behind a pro-Keystone XL pipeline publicity stunt in front of the White House in 2011, where two women wearing burkas stood holding a hand-lettered sign that read "Stop tar sands, Stop Canada, Americans4OPEC.com." The Americans4OPEC.com website states that it’s a satire created by EthicalOil.org to highlight “the choice Americans now have: A choice between several more decades of dependency on OPEC’s conflict oil or a future built on reliable, secure, and peaceful ethical oil from neighbouring Canada."

Despite the apologies and public backlash, Levant hasn’t slowed down his attempts to stir up controversy, and spew misleading information. His strategy, as we’ve noted in the past on DeSmog Canada, is to use brazen PR stunts and disinformation to confuse the debate around whatever issue he is tackling at the time. Levant is particularly focused these days on promoting the oil sands, with a campaign that tries to vilify his opponents through the use of lies and deception.

Consider Levant’s recent attack against well-known environmentalist David Suzuki, who he falsely accused of having requested female “escorts” to act as bodyguards during an October 2012 visit to John Abbott College in Montreal. As part of his illogical attempt to portray Dr. Suzuki as a dirty old man and sully his reputation, Levant further twisted the truth by taking some of Suzuki’s past writings and quoting them out of context to fit his manufactured story.

The college responded to the accusations with a statement saying Dr. Suzuki had both male and female students accompanying him throughout the day, and calling Levant’s assessment a misinterpretation of the facts. “There was no rider in Dr. Suzuki’s contract specifying the gender or dress code of those assisting him throughout the day. The negative comments and innuendos made are demeaning to those students and to the College … .”

Levant’s disregard for facts was also recently highlighted on his TV show when he accused “white billionaires from New York” of using “First Nation puppets” to try to stop pipeline developments in North America.

Most Canadians understand Levant’s purpose is political entertainment. Few take it seriously. Still, Canadians should ask themselves: Is this really the kind of dialogue we want filling the public square?

Wouldn’t it be more productive, not to mention more Canadian, if our debates around critical issues such as environment and resource development were based on facts, not a slew of misinformation and personal attacks?

Of course, creating and maintaining an open dialogue is hard work. It’s also not as entertaining as watching people take cheap shots and fire off false statements about their opponents. Yet, it’s the boring work that must be done if we are to come to decisions that reflect the values of most Canadians.

Let’s start by turning the volume down on shock seekers like Levant. Removing this pollution-filled type of communication is the first step to cleaning up Canada’s polluted public square.

Jim Hoggan is president and owner of award-winning strategic communication firm Hoggan & Associates, founder of DeSmogBlog, and chair of the David Suzuki Foundation.

Image Credit: University of Saskatchewan via flickr.

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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 is Part One of a three-part series on the political greenwashing of the tar sands in Canada.

When I hatched the idea to write a book about the use of spin and propaganda in the battle over the tar sands, a close friend of mine suggested I avoid the term “tar sands.” His logic was simple: using this term, which has become a pejorative, would turn some people off, people who might benefit, he said, from reading my book.

His recommendation was meant to be helpful, but it speaks to the power of manipulating language to make people believe something appears to be something that it is not. “Greenwashing” refers to the strategy of intentionally exaggerating a product’s environmental credentials in order to sell it, and nowhere has greenwashing been more generously used than in the promotion of the tar sands and the new and bigger pipelines that proponents hope will carry it around the world.

Greenwashing is fairly recent phenomenon—it was only added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 1999—but it has become commonplace as public concern has grown over the spate of environmental problems we now face, and as consumers demand “greener” products as a means of solving them. The most recent analysis by TerraChoice Environmental Marketing found that although the number of green products is growing, the marketing of more than 95 per cent of them still commits one the seven sins of greenwashing.

The most egregious of these greenwashing efforts include such misleading efforts to market coal as “clean,” which is simply an Orwellian way of referring to the dirtiest of all hydrocarbon energy sources; greenhouse-gas intensive shale oil as faux-green “EcoShale”; and, yes, the characterization of the pollution-laden and climate-warming tar sands as a responsible, sustainable, even “green” source of energy.

It comes as a surprise to most people I talk to that “tar sands” was actually the preferred term for Alberta’s newest hydrocarbon resource when it first came to market in the late 1960s. It wasn’t until the environmental community began to educate the public about the dirty downsides of turning bitumen into crude in the late 1990s that Big Oil and Canadian governments began using the term more useful and cleaner-sounding “oil sands” to promote its development in northern Alberta.

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But this was only the first step in the greenwashing of the tar sands. The media was coerced into using “oil sands” rather than the once-dominant “tar sands” by tar sands proponents’ relentless attacks on those who used the term “tar sands,” portraying them as environmental extremists and disloyal Canadians. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), for instance, actually has a language policy that mandates the use of “oil sands,” claiming it is “more neutral and more accurate because the substance refined from the extracted bitumen is oil.” (As Canadian journalist Andrew Nikiforuk, whose award-winning book Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, points out, if this was really how we named things, then we’d call tomatoes “ketchup” and trees “lumber.) This only serves to reinforce the aims of the pro-tar sands lobby, which is to portray the tar sands in as benign a light as possible.

When using the term “oil sands” was no longer enough to counter growing evidence about the environmental impacts of the tar sands, the oil industry polled Canadians to better understand how they viewed tar sands development. Not surprisingly, Canadians, regardless of political affiliation, wanted oil companies to limit the environmental impacts of developing Canada’s tar sands. In short, they wanted them developed responsibly.

The natural response was to tell Canadians what they wanted to hear. Rather than address the growing environmental concerns—particularly growing greenhouse gas emissions and increasing evidence of toxic pollution in ground and surface water, not to mention the impending extirpation of the region’s threatened caribou populations—the Alberta government continued to approve record-breaking numbers of tar sands projects, and the oil industry, and the Alberta and federal governments began using the terms “clean,” “responsible,” and “sustainable” to characterize tar sands development.

Ezra Levant, a former tobacco-lobbyist and virulent tar sands promoter, added the term “ethical oil” by writing a book arguing that Canada’s tar sands crude was the most ethical oil on the planet. He argued that because Canada was a democracy with strong environmental laws and regulation and an excellent human rights record, tar sands oil was better than oil from authoritarian dictatorships like Saudi Arabia. Despite the fact his analysis was roundly criticized by professional ethicists, the term caught on and was adopted by media pundits and even politicians.

The latest greenwashing torpedo came recently from Canadian Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver, who pitched the tar sands as a “green” energy source, and then told an audience in Chicago that “Canada is the environmentally responsible choice for the U.S. to meet its energy needs in oil for years to come.” That this is the greenest of greenwashing has been ably debunked here, there and everywhere.

It’s clear that the rhetoric from Canada’s pro-tar sands politicians has continued to escalate over the years, from a subtle name change to outlandish and unsupportable claims of environmental virtue. While this may seem like an unimportant debate about semantics, it is really an illustration of how dangerous these tactics are. When this kind of messaging is injected into speeches, media coverage, and well-funded advertising campaigns, it works. Polls, many of which use greenwashing techniques of their own to conceal the true environmental risks and impacts of the tar sands, indicate the majority of Canadians believe that it’s possible to increase oil and gas development and still protect the environment, so they support tar sands development as long as “a continuous effort to limit the environmental impact” is being made.

It doesn’t matter whether language is being used honestly and with integrity, or whether the environmental impact of the tar sands is actually being reduced (it is not). What matters is that greenwashing is having a dangerously misleading impact on Canadians’ perceptions of tar sands development.

Part II of this series will explore whether the greenwashing activities of Canadian politicians and governments would get passing grades from the federal government’s Environmental Claims Guidelines for Industry and Advertising.

Image Credit: Cumulative Environmental Management Association report on tar sands tailings ponds

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This post is the first in a two-part series. For Part 2, click here.

In death as in life, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez has provoked more than his fair share of criticism and commentary in Canada. When the elected socialist leader died on March 5th after a two-year struggle with cancer, Canadians were quick to offer their condolences—with varying degrees of tact.

Former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien reminisced about Chávez’s fondness for baseball, and noted his frank willingness to criticize the United States. NDP member of Parliament Paul Dewar extended his sympathies to the Chávez family and affirmed the ongoing relationship between Canada and Venezuela.

At the current Prime Minister’s Office, Stephen Harper painted Chávez’s death as an opportunity for the people of Venezuela to “build for themselves a better, brighter future based on the principles of freedom, democracy, the rule of law and respect for human rights.” This statement drew a formal complaint from the Venezuelan government, criticizing Harper for making “insensitive and impertinent statements” while the country grieves. 

Harper had long considered Chávez to be an ideological opponent and an obstacle to progress in the Western Hemisphere, feelings he made clear in a 2009 Postmedia News interview before the Summit of the Americas. During the interview, Harper described Chávez as the leader of “an authoritarian state run on petro dollars” who was “opposed to basically sound economic policies.”

In less enlightened quarters of Canadian politics, responses to the Venezuelan President’s death were not nearly so measured. From Sun Media’s charming correspondent Ezra Levant, Chávez earned himself three words: “burn in hell.” 

Why does the death of Chávez mark the beginning of a new, brighter era in the mind of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and the start of an eternity of torment according to Ezra Levant? The answer might have something to do with oil.

Venezuela is a petro-state that sits on the largest known oil reserves in the world: 17.9 percent, compared to Saudi Arabia’s 16.1 percent and Canada’s 11 percent. But despite the country’s vast reserves, current production sits at only 3.5 percent of global output. Low production rates and limited exploration of new fields have been attributed to the mismanagement of Venezuela’s national oil company, PDVSA.

Immediately following Chávez’s death, speculation began about the prospects for international investors seeking to reenter Venezuela’s nationalized energy sector—a development that could mean increased competition for producers in Alberta’s tar sands.

But for proponents of the tar sands, Venezuela is more than just competition; it’s a key selling point for Canadian oil. As the now-familiar refrain of the Ethical Oil Institute goes, Canada’s oil is ethical, while the oil produced in countries like Venezuela is ethically-compromised conflict oil. The worse Chávez looks, the better the Canadian alternative.

Ethical oil is a made-in-Canada campaign developed to distract the attention of Canadians away from the tar sands by pointing fingers abroad. But as the planned pipeline shipment of Alberta bitumen to refineries in the United States becomes increasingly contentious south of the border, the campaign is finding new life as a popular export product. Gary Doer, Canada’s Ambassador to the US, recently rolled out the ethical oil talking points to help galvanize support for the Keystone XL pipeline in the United States.

For Doer, the choice is a clear one: either we support the heinous Hugo Chávez or Alberta Premier Alison Redford. The demonization of Hugo Chávez has long been a feature of the ethical oil sales campaign, reinforced in no small measure by the international media. With Chávez gone and the future of Venezuela uncertain, it’s worth taking a closer look at his legacy to see if the former president deserves to live on as an accidental salesman for Canadian oil. 

Image Credit: que comunismo via flickr.

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