Stephen Harper’s efforts to frame environmentalists as radicals who deserve to be investigated by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service took three years to come to fruition.

It’s often claimed that Harper’s vendetta against environmental groups springs from his unconditional support for the oil industry. While that is more or less evident, it’s also necessary to consider the dominant influences — from his evangelical Christianity and his neoliberal ideology — on his tactics.

It was in early January 2012 that the Harper government first attacked opponents of the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline. Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver released an open letter accusing “radical” environmentalists and “jet-setting celebrities” of blocking efforts to open access to Asian markets for Canadian oil.

“These groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda,” Oliver, a former investment banker who raised money for oil companies, wrote. “They seek to exploit any loophole they can find, stacking public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill good projects.”

What’s God Got to Do With It?

A week earlier, to welcome in the 2012 American election year, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum gave a New Year’s Eve speech in Ottumwa, Iowa, in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses. By rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline, Santorum warned, President Obama was “pandering to radical environmentalists who don’t want energy production, who don’t want us to burn more carbon.”

It may have been coincidental that the Harper government and the Santorum candidacy raised the spectre of radical environmentalism at the same time, but there are interesting connections.

Santorum’s remarks went viral later in February when, at a campaign stop in Ohio, he accused Obama of believing in “some phony ideal, some phony theology. Not a theology based on the Bible.”

A theology based on the Bible, Santorum explained at his Ohio stop, would be “about the belief that man is — should be — in charge of the Earth and have dominion over it and be good stewards of it.” But the “radical environmentalist” believes that “man is here to serve the Earth, as opposed to husband its resources and be good stewards of the Earth. And I think that is a phony ideal.”

For evangelical Christians like Santorum, it’s a simple proposition: Resisting bitumen extraction and transport is a denial of God’s law. Santorum is up front with his conservative religious beliefs; Harper keeps his views to himself, although the influence of evangelicals and social conservatives in his government was detailed in Marci McDonald’s The Armageddon Factor.

Since 2003, Harper has been a member of Ottawa’s East Gate Alliance Church, which is affiliated with the Christian and Missionary Alliance. The statement of faith of this church declares that “The Old and New Testaments, inerrant as originally given, were verbally inspired by God and are a complete revelation of His will for the salvation of people. They constitute the divine and only rule of Christian faith and practice.”

That puts bitumen extraction and transport under the direct authority of God, even in Canada. It should be noted that several other Christian denominations believe their faith mandates them to care for the earth. Pope Francis is even holding his own climate change summit.

In the U.S., God is tacked on to just about every political speech; in Canada, politicians rarely conjure the divine. But in Canada Harper has remained notably taciturn about his beliefs.

As McDonald observed, Harper was aware of “the risks of mixing faith and politics: he had watched creationist sentiments sink the leadership career of his Canadian Alliance rival Stockwell Day.”

But there are also the numbers to consider.

In the U.S., more than 30 per cent of the population is evangelical; in Canada the figure is 10 to 12 per cent. Santorum has a lot to gain, but Harper risks alienating a large majority of Canadians if he uses Santorum’s messaging techniques.

Nonetheless, McDonald notes, Harper covertly courted the religious right to his political advantage, using social-conservative policies to broaden the appeal of his party.

Faith in the Free Market

Attacking environmentalists who defy God’s law is one useful approach. Attacking environmentalists who interfere with the market is another.

Here Harper follows the lead, not of the Bible, but of Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist who founded neoliberalism after the Second World War.

The neoliberal view of environmentalism is typified by former Czech Republic president Vaclav Klaus. In a 2008 speech Klaus said he considered “environmentalism and its current strongest version — climate alarmism — to be … the most effective and … dangerous vehicle for advocating, drafting and implementing large-scale government intervention and for an unprecedented suppression of human freedom.”

The dispute was “not about temperature or CO2,” he insisted, but instead was “another variant of the old, well-known debate: freedom and free markets versus dirigisme [state control], political control and regulation…”

It was the same old logically twisted story: self- “anointed” alarmists are here to “restrict freedom and stop human prosperity” under the guise of protecting the planet.

Efforts to control global warming go to the heart of Hayek’s critique of central planning. In The Road to Serfdom, he wrote planning “would make the very men who are most anxious to plan society the most dangerous if they were allowed to do so … From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step.” The planner and coordinator, Hayek opined, was little more than an “omniscient dictator.”

Stephen Harper, the Hayek-influenced economist, was certainly on board with this analysis. He was leader of the Canadian Alliance in October 2002, when the Chrétien government was preparing to ask Parliament to ratify the Kyoto Accord. Harper wrote a letter to Alliance members requesting funds to stop ratification.

“Kyoto is essentially a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations,” Harper wrote. “I’m talking about the ‘battle of Kyoto’ — our campaign to block the job-killing, economy-destroying Kyoto Accord.”

The current use of the term “radical environmentalist,” with its appeal to both evangelicals and neoliberals, comes from a decade-old Frank Luntz briefing memo for the Republican Party, “The environment: A cleaner, safer, healthier America.”

“’Environmentalist’ can have the connotation of extremist to many Americans,” he wrote.

Luntz, a long-time Republican pollster and strategist, specializes is using language to evoke feeling. In a 2003 interview on PBS’s Frontline, he said: “My job is to look for the words that trigger the emotion. Words alone can be found in a dictionary or a telephone book, but words with emotion can change destiny, can change life as we know it.”

Luntz travelled to Ottawa in the spring of 2006 to help Preston Manning promote his new project, the Manning Centre for Building Democracy, which was intended to advance conservative ideas and politicians. His connection to Manning went back to the 1993 federal election, when Luntz was the Reform Party’s official election pollster and strategic adviser.

With Luntz’s help, the Progressive Conservatives under Kim Campbell were annihilated — Luntz watched the election results from Manning’s suite — and Reform emerged as the party of the right. Thirteen years later, along with helping Manning, Luntz met with Harper for a photo-op session and to provide advice for Harper’s new minority government.

Luntz was impressed with Harper, who he called “a genuine intellectual, brilliant in his understanding of issues.”

In 2006 at a conference of conservative politicians, academics, journalists and think tank functionaries, Luntz advised the audience to tap into national symbols like hockey. “If there is some way to link hockey to what you all do, I would try to do it.” Before long, Harper was writing a book about hockey.

And he was making good use of Luntz’s radical environmentalist frame.

As in his other framing exercises, Harper’s message came from multiple sources inside and outside government. In Parliament, Fort McMurray-Athabasca Conservative MP Brian Jean called for legislation that would block foreign funding of the “radical” Canadian environmental movement. In Washington, D.C., Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird told an interviewer “there’s a great deal of frustration … that the future prosperity of our country could lie in the hands of some radical environmentalists and special interests.”

Outside government, Marco Navarro-Genie, research director at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, a regional neoliberal think tank, claimed that the “real aim [of] … radical environmentalists is eventually to stop production of all hydrocarbons.”

Did it work?

Later in the year, the Montreal Economic Institute, another regional neoliberal think tank, released a survey suggesting that a majority of Canadians — 52 per cent — think “several environmental lobbies are too radical,” compared with 27 per cent who disagree with this statement. The survey also found that 72 per cent of Canadians are in favour of developing the bitumen deposits, “while maintaining a continuous effort to limit the environmental impact.”

Send in the Auditors and the Spies

Harper must have been emboldened by the success of this campaign for him to take the next step. In 2012, Harper allocated $13.4 million to the CRA to undertake audits of the political activities and foreign funding of charities. At least 52 audits were done, almost all on organizations critical of Harper’s policies. 

Read DeSmog Canada’s in-depth series on Canada’s charitable sector: Charities and Non-Profits: A Force for a Better World

And that wasn’t the end of it, as surveillance moved up the food chain from CRA to CSIS and the RCMP. Even before the Harper government tabled Bill C-51, The Anti-Terrorism Act, in the House of Commons in January 2015, CSIS, Canada’s spy agency, was making recommendations to federal officials about how to deal with protests expected after the Harper government gave conditional approval to Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline in June 2014.

CSIS provided senior government officials with a federal risk forecast for the 2014 “spring/summer protest and demonstration season” compiled by the government operations centre, which tracks and analyzes such activity.

An RCMP intelligence assessment obtained by Greenpeace Canada and first published on DeSmog Canada highlighted a disturbing narrative about what the police force viewed as “violent anti-petroleum extremists.”

Vivian Krause, the North Vancouver researcher who created the conspiracy theory that U.S. foundations were funding Canadian environmental groups to prevent the expansion of oilsands production, was the single most important source for the RCMP report. Her work was given ten pages in the 44-page report, while global warming denier Patrick Moore was one of the most cited sources.

Some intelligence assessment.

But that didn’t seem to matter. What started out as a Frank Luntz talking point had become reality.

The radical environmentalist frame could count on a strong base of support from evangelicals and neoliberals. Constant repetition and government action by the CRA and then CSIS and the RCMP made it newsworthy. And what the media report must be real.

That’s how Stephen Harper makes his world.

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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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In his recent book Harperism: How Stephen Harper and His Think Tank Colleagues have Transformed Canada, author and adjunct SFU professor Donald Gutstein outlines a battle being waged in Canada for the “climate of ideas.”

The Prime Minister is often thought of as a lone wolf, “the rogue conservative who marches to his own drummer.” But it’s not so, argues Gutstein. Harper is merely “one side of an ideological coin.”

The flipside is the network of key influencers — politicians, industry titans, think tanks, journalists — who work to advance not just Harper’s agenda, but the agenda of neoliberalism that serves powerful private interests, Gutstein says.

According to Gutstein, public sentiment in Canada — around things like environmental policy, free-market orthodoxy and the collection of taxes — is strongly influenced by a cadre of like-minded individuals and organizations who work in conjunction to, for example, sway public opinion on implementing a carbon tax or funding the arts.

The overall effect of this strategy has been the emergence of Harperism, a political style ruled by market logic and economic freedom. What has been lost along the way is robust democratic participation in Canadian decision-making, checks and balances, scientific integrity and the influence of civil society groups, Gutstein argues.

I recently spoke with Gutstein about attacks on environmental groups in Canada and asked him to explain how he sees this factoring into the broader political landscape.

Q: How do you see oil and gas interests, free-market think tanks and the Conservative government banding together to “neutralize,” as you say in your book, environmental opposition?

A: Harper and the think tanks rarely get together but they do work together in a very well understood way. The think tanks are working over a long period of time to change the climate of ideas. They can’t force us to think differently but they cast doubt on the motivation of environmental groups — ‘where do you get your funding?” — these questions are up in the air.

That makes it easier for Harper to do something: attack them, cut off their funding or ignore them. It makes it easier to happen today than it was 10 years ago. I do think environmental groups’ reputations have been sullied or tarnished by this constant work on them.

The articles, the op-ed pieces, the news stories with quotes from the think tanks — all this eventually changes the climate of ideas about environmentalism.

Q: I really like this idea in your book of transforming the “climate of ideas.” It sheds a light on how democracy works, or the way that opinions or perspectives are formed within a democratic setting. Things like the credibility of environmental organizations are really up for grabs in the media. You see grand claims being made, often without substantiation, that could damage the reputation of an environmental organization. I think it was Mark Twain who said ‘a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.’ How do you see this strategy of casting doubt and changing the climate of ideas at work in our democracy?

A: I’d probably need to think more about this question, but one example springs to mind: when Ezra Levant was doing his Ethical Oil campaign he would write op-eds in the Toronto Sun attacking Greenpeace, but the Toronto Sun would never give any space to Greenpeace to say what they are really about or to respond to Levant’s wild charges.

So all the readers knew about Greenpeace was what they read from Ezra Levant.

The way the media frame stories, who they give voices to — that has a lot to do with what ideas gain in credibility and get a more positive or more negative tarnish to it.

That’s just one example, but it’s a bigger picture.

I appreciate that things have changed quite a bit because of Twitter, Facebook and the internet, but I think that the corporate media still play a defining role in determining which ideas get promoted, and which ideas are ignored.

I love that quote…“If the media don’t report on an issue, it might as well not exist.” I think that’s so profound. It’s the other side of asking: which ideas do they promote, and how do they spin them, which things are credible and which are not?

I think the media still play an important role…even on the Internet. So much of what is on Facebook and Twitter are responses or commentaries to what’s in the media.

Q: Do you see certain individuals being deployed as ‘ambassadors’ of anti-environmental or free-market ideas?

A: Oh sure. That’s a long-standing strategy. Just this morning someone contacted me about an article I wrote on Rabble about John Luik, who was a frontman for the tobacco industry. He wrote all these books and papers and was secretly funded by the tobacco industry for years and years.

He’s the model. There are lots of people like this that operate as individuals. [Luik] even did work — wrote a book — for the Fraser Institute criticizing the need to regulate second-hand smoke. Individuals exist as individual personalities and in a way they can seem more credible.

Q: Do you see individuals like blogger Vivian Krause in this kind of light? She appeared on the scene as this independent researcher just asking questions on the Internet and in no time she was thrust into the national spotlight and given some of our most prominent media platforms. On her resume she even credits herself with initiating the Canada Revenue Agency investigation and audits of Canada’s environmental charities. It seems she’s become a ‘rising star’ because her narrative served the interests and needs of the Harper government and the fossil fuel industry. Do you see her falling into the typical pattern of how individuals are deployed to serve certain interests?

A: There are hundreds of millions of bloggers, so why did she rise to the top? She’s getting op-eds in the news media and it’s interesting to look at that.

She writes for the National Post, which is the most amenable to this kind of corporate propaganda. The Financial Post, which is just the business section of the National Post, is edited by Terrance Corcoran and he’s for a long time gone after ‘junk science’ and has attacked Greenpeace and the environmental movement for decades. So that would be a really good home for her.

[Krause] wouldn’t have really gotten anywhere unless corporate media and some of the industry groups started seeing the benefit of having her.

If she can take away from the harm they’re doing to the environment and move it to the supposedly nasty things that the energy industry’s critics are up to then that really gets the heat off them to a large extent.

She would be playing a pretty significant role for them.

Q: What do you anticipate happening in Canada over the next year as we move into the next federal election?

A: Well that’s an interesting one. Harper has so many files open, from the one on the First Nations property ownership act, trying to transform First Nations [reserves] into private property, but that’s sort of on hold. He moved forward on it to a point. And then the attacks on environmentalists have gone so far…it’s hard to know what he’ll focus on.

They’ve set the narrative for the next election with income-sharing and the child tax benefits.

…

If Stephen Harper is voted back in it will be unimaginable, the plans he has ready to go.

If the Harper Conservatives did get back in, it’s incremental, he would move to deregulate new areas, remove the significance of scientific information. He would find places here and there.

He would probably boost the ability of environment Canada to do financial costing of ecosystem services.

It’s never going to be a huge move, it’s always going to be these small steps, but they all add up eventually into something huge. 

Image Credit: Prime Minister's Photo Gallery

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Canadians are inundated with ads from Enbridge, Cenovus, Kinder Morgan, Shell and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

But we’re also targeted by a more insidious type of PR brought into the spotlight by the New York Times scoop on a speech Richard Berman gave to the Western Energy Alliance.

In that speech, Berman told the group’s members — mostly oil and gas companies — they had to be prepared to "win ugly" in an "endless war" against environmentalists. 

We are now finding out we are also subjected to secretly funded propaganda from groups like the “Environmental Policy Alliance” (whose self-conciously chosen initials are EPA, the same as the U.S. government’s Environment Protection Agency), or the more obviously biased “Big Green Radicals.”

Let’s take publicity-averse oil and gas players like the Koch brothers, for example. They are one of the largest leaseholders in the oilsands, and major contributors to Canada's Fraser Institute. Their combined net worth of $85.4 billion is greater than that of Bill Gates. And they are no doubt secretly spending untold sums of money influencing elections throughout North America, lobbying against environmental groups and attempting to ridicule or “diminish [progessives'] moral authority.”

Loaded Messages and Commercial Warfare

Propaganda, as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, is “an organized program of publicity, selected information, etc., used to propagate a doctrine, practice, etc.”

It is regarded as misleading and dishonest. It often presents facts selectively (thus possibly lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis or uses loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented. Propaganda can be used as a form of ideological or commercial warfare.

Enter Vivian Krause, the “researcher” who has spent years attacking Canada’s environmental groups.

Looking at a July 2014 Alberta Oil article penned by Krause, one can’t help but note how she delicately skirts around issues like the value of intact ecosystems and their useful services. She also ignores anthropogenic global warming and instead funnels the entire support system for Canada’s environmental advocacy groups down into her favoured conspiracy theory: the plan to destroy Canada’s fossil fuel industry to protect U.S. interests.

To do this, Krause needs some serious blinders on. For example, she describes a strategy paper called “Designed to Win: Philanthropy’s Role in the Fight Against Global Warming.” The phrase “global warming” is right there in front of her, in black and white, but she skips around it and zooms in on a pejorative view of the “education campaigns” to shift investment into large-scale renewable energy — as if going from fossil fuels to renewables was just some random, self-serving business decision.

She makes no mention of the concerns of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the American Association for the Advancement of Science or the World Bank (does she see them all as a soft, self-serving and self-indulgent elite?), all of whom think that global climate change is a really big issue, and all of whom have far more credibility than Krause.

Krause writes disparagingly of the Consultative Group on Biological Diversity, an organization created in 1987 by the U.S. Agency for International Development. Over the years, it has morphed into a focal point for philanthropic foundations that want to help make a better world. The stated vision of the organization is: “A sustainable, just and healthy future for all life on Earth, advanced by a vibrant and effective philanthropic sector.”

These high-minded goals are of no interest to Krause. All she cares about is that some of the $440 million handed out all over the world by the 64 charitable foundations that compose this organization has gone to Canadian environmental groups and First Nations communities, and some of that portion of their donations has been used to advocate against expansion of fossil fuel extraction, processing and transport.

But the real monstrosity of her claim is highlighted by a look at the bigger picture in which Krause’s critique is placed. 

Adding up all the money that has been spent by American charitable foundations on environmental issues in Canada in the last 15 years — that appears to be the timeframe of Krause’ analysis — the entire sum, from the numbers scattered here and there in her article, is about $500 million.

That may seem like a very large sum of money at first glance, but put in context it’s not. First of all, this is spread across dozens of organizations and across a decade and a half, making the annual grants to any single organization modest.

Secondly, dwarfing these sums is the vast fiscal colossus of the fossil fuel industry itself. While berating environmental groups and their funders, Krause makes no mention of the astonishing wealth taken in and spent by the oil and gas industry on a constant, relentless basis, day in and day out.

In the year 2013, the players in the oil and gas industry who are connected just to the oilsands — let’s call them “the Bitumen Boys” — earned the following astronomical sums:

What is obvious in this table is that the in-and-out totals of the Bitumen Boys, and the profits delivered to shareholders, as well as the total revenue stream, dwarf anything received from philanthropy by several orders of magnitude. Of the 22 companies listed, most profited more in one year, by many multiples, than their non-profit counterparts gained in 15 years.

In fact, the total profits of these 22 Bitumen Boys in one fiscal year — $142.7 billion — is 284 times the entire sum of money given to all environmental groups mentioned by Krause over 15 fiscal years.

Put another way, all the money given to environmental groups over 15 years was 0.35 per cent of the net annual profits of the companies developing the oilsands.

Yet Krause finishes her Alberta Oil article by saying: “For the fossil fuel industries, the battle with environmental activists is no longer David versus Goliath.”

It’s misleading and dishonest and she’s got to know that isn’t the case. Propaganda anyone?

Overlooking Oil Industry Spending

We don’t know the exact amount of money Enbridge is spending on its ad campaigns, because the cost for this public relations blitz is buried in generalized headings like “operating and administrative” or similar non-specific designations.

Krause never mentions oil company expenditures. Couple it with the plethora of opaque front groups like Ethical Oil that play by the Richard Berman playbook, and it’s clear that only the industry's inner circle can find out who pays for what.

Krause casts a blind eye toward oil industry spending, as well as the biological and climatological science that motivates many philanthropic foundations and non-profit groups to take action. She also adamantly skirts mention of the massive profits that motivate the fossil fuel industry.

If Krause wants to opine that global climate change, widespread pollution, population growth, species loss and over-exploitation of biological resources are minor issues, then she and I (along with most other Canadians) part company.

I’m throwing my lot in with the IPCC, with ecological economists like UBC’s Bill Rees, with my colleague John O’Connor whose direct field observations as a physician raise serious concerns about oilsands development, with the economists who are taking climate change seriously and with the public relations industry that has ruled out working with climate deniers.

The question is: who’s left to throw their lot in with Krause?

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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

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The below video originally appeared on the Toronto Star.

Birdwatchers – the paparazzi of the natural world – are subverting our democracy according to the Canada Revenue Agency – the overbearing mother of the financial world.

The Kitchener-Waterloo Field Naturalists, a registered charity, recently wrote a letter to federal cabinet members complaining about pesticides linked to dying bees. Shortly after, they got a letter from CRA warning them to “refrain from undertaking any partisan activities.” Activities like their dogmatic anti-bee-death manifesto.

It’s part of a recent crackdown on charities for political activities. CRA rules state that to get tax-free status a charity must be non-partisan. But what charity isn’t partisan? They all support something. We don’t say “Okay, we’ve heard from the ice-bucket challenge guys, but let’s give the pro-ALS folks a chance to weigh in on this… and their buckets of lava.”

And if CRA is so concerned with partisan charities, why aren’t they auditing The Fraser Institute? A “charitable” right-wing think tank whose heroic mission is to protect private profits from abuse by the poor, and protect climate change deniers from reality, and whose donors include Exxon, the tobacco industry and the Koch brothers. They tried getting a donation from Hans Gruber and someone had to tell them that was just the bad guy in Die Hard that’s not a real guy.

And if we’re really serious about people avoiding taxes, what are we doing about the billions we lose each year to offshore tax havens? It turns out, not much. Documents leaked early this year show that over 3000 full-time positions will be cut from the CRA budget in the next four years, including auditors.

So if the birdwatchers really want to keep the CRA off their back, they don’t need to stop partisan activities. They just need to stop being not rich. 

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We’re all taught in life that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. The sentiment has been applied to Germany’s renewable energy transition, or Energiewende, with critics questioning emission reduction reporting or arguing costs of new systems are too high. But even if the Energiewende isn’t quite as shiny as it first appears, there are still a few important lessons from Germany's energy transition that Canada can take to heart.

Localized and democratized energy production

Where once there were only four companies supplying energy to the German grid, there are now 1.2 million contributors, and Jacobs said that number is only growing. The result is a decentralized and localized system of energy production and supply.  

Germany's next steps

Political obstacles to Canada's energy transition

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This is a guest post by Will Horter, executive director of the Dogwood Initiative. It was originally published in the Toronto Star.

Earthquakes happen rarely in Canadian politics, but the fault lines are shifting again on the West Coast. As the next federal election draws closer, conditions below the surface should remind political observers of another seismic event a generation ago.

Back in the early 1990s, Stephen Harper and the insurgent Reform Party forced a tectonic shift, unleashing a powerful wave of western alienation that has realigned Canadian politics to this day. Their slogan was: “The West wants in.”

You could sum up the feeling in British Columbia lately as, “The West wants out.” Today you could get in your car in Kenora and drive clear across the Prairies to the coast without ever leaving a blue Conservative riding. But the road through the Rocky Mountains could become tricky indeed if Harper’s party doesn’t change course.

The central question for British Columbians, as it was for Albertans in the 1980s and ’90s, is this: who gets to decide what’s in our best interest — Ottawa or the people who live here?

As pundits debate the technical merits of crude oil and coal export proposals through B.C., they miss the deeper sense of alienation that’s taking hold. British Columbians and especially First Nations are growing increasingly resentful of decisions they feel have been imposed on them from the outside.

A poll this year by the Manning Centre (led by Harper’s former boss, Preston Manning) found fully 68 per cent of people in B.C. feel the country is going in the wrong direction. Asked why the number was so high, the former Reform Party leader said “pipelines.”

People in B.C. don’t want out of Canada, but they want out of the Harper government’s national energy plan, such as it is. Becoming a fossil-fuel export “superpower,” in Harper’s words, holds little appeal for communities caught between Alberta’s oilsands and the refineries in Asia.

A powerful majority of British Columbians, including plenty of Tory voters, simply aren’t willing to risk their magnificent coast, local health and existing jobs for the benefit of global energy corporations — especially China’s voracious state-owned oil giants.

What shifted the tectonic plates in Alberta over decades was the chronic feeling that the federal government was preoccupied with Quebec and Ontario, leaving the West to act as the piggy bank for central Canada.

The earthquake was triggered by then prime minister Pierre Trudeau, whose infamous National Energy Program was seen as a way to redistribute wealth generated in the Alberta oilpatch to Ottawa.

Albertans were furious. A popular sticker on many truck bumpers at the time read: “Let the eastern bastards freeze in the dark.” (A reprint would probably do a brisk trade in many B.C. communities today.)

Twenty-five years on, the centre of power has shifted to Alberta. The National Energy Program is replaced in the current drama by the the National Energy Board, tasked with rubber-stamping the Enbridge and Kinder Morgan pipeline proposals. The electoral battlegrounds are different, but the conversations on the doorstep remain the same.

Harper is the grassroots activist who once wrote to Alberta premier Ralph Klein: “It is imperative to take the initiative, to build firewalls around Alberta, to limit the extent to which an aggressive and hostile federal government can encroach upon legitimate provincial jurisdiction.”

Now Harper is the federal government, responsible for pushing unwanted projects on an unwilling province. It’s startling how far he has strayed from his populist, Reform Party roots.

Here’s another way of understanding the situation: imagine Enbridge’s crude oil pipeline and oil tanker project had been proposed for Quebec and not B.C.

What would happen if Ottawa appointed a three-person panel to review a controversial infrastructure proposal and not a single Quebecer was appointed to the panel?

Suppose before the panel even held hearings, a federal cabinet minister blasted citizens signed up for the pipeline review as “foreign radicals,” working to sabotage Canada’s national interest? What would the local newspapers say when leaked documents revealed Harper had sent CSIS and the RCMP to illegally spy on peaceful opponents?

If Ottawa forced through such a project in the face of majority opposition in Quebec, the pundits wouldn’t be talking about respecting the “due process” of the hearings. They’d be using the s-word.

There is a major difference between B.C. and its provincial cousins to the east. Here, the land question was never settled. First Nations for the most part have never signed treaties with the federal government. Mix in the alienation felt by everyday voters and the political stakes are high indeed.

Underestimating the tectonic shift underway in British Columbia could lead to a political earthquake in 2015. The results could change Canadian politics for a generation.

Image Credit: Chief Ian Campbell of the Squamish First Nation. Photo by Kris Krug.

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Canada’s charitable sector — the second largest charitable sector in the world, after the Netherlands — has come under threat from federal policies that hinder advocacy groups from doing their work, according to new research.

As DeSmog Canada and other outlets have reported, numerous charities — ranging from development organizations to women’s rights groups — have lost their funding from the federal government during the last several years.

Most recently, in June of 2012, the federal government announced $8 million would be devoted to investigating and auditing charities to ensure their activities comply with Canada Revenue Agency rules. (DeSmog Canada recently revealed through Access to Information legislation that, in fact, more than $13 million has been dedicated to these audits).

Several individuals and organizations have criticized the audits as politically-motivated.

So far, we haven’t heard much from the charities themselves under audit, because, with resources already stretched thin and sometimes multiple federal auditors scrutinizing their work, speaking out has been seen as too much of a risk.

But what charities haven’t been able to say for themselves is now outlined in a new analysis by former journalist and graduate student Gareth Kirkby. His research on the ‘chill effect’ that resulted from the ongoing audits was brought together in his thesis (attached below), recently submitted to faculty in the public communications department at Royal Roads University.

According to Kirkby, who guaranteed 16 charities under audit anonymity in his research, groups have drastically changed their behaviour since the wave of audits, limiting their capability to carry out their mandates, which involve advocating for progressive changes that will benefit often under-represented communities, individuals and the environment.

According to Kirky’s research, charities that work on advocacy issues face the toughest scrutiny from the federal government. Environmental organizations dealing with issues related to the petroleum industry, Kirkby said, “seem to be the most heavily targeted.”

The audits have “amounted to a change in the discourse emanating from these organizations,” Kirkby told DeSmog Canada in a recent interview. And this is happening at a time, he said, when we need these groups more engaged.

“We have some complicated and challenging issues in our society right now that we really need to talk about. And we need to talk about these issues openly, vigorously and without intimidation from the government.”

The transition in Canada

Changes to the charitable sector were dramatically accelerated under the leadership of the Harper government, especially after the Conservatives won a majority in 2011, Kirkby’s research found.

By 2006, Kirkby said, it was clear what the incoming government’s priorities were, and what they were not.

“It was very clear right off the bat with the first budget in 2006,” Kirkby said. “There were major cuts in funding to organizations that had received [previous funding] from the federal government.”

These included funding cuts to groups that, in some cases, had been operating on for half a century — charities like the Court Challenges Program, the Canadian Council on International Co-operation, MATCH International, the Rights and Democracy Agency and the church group KAIROS. (A detailed analysis of funding cuts to charities between 2006 and 2011 can be found in the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives report: Silencing Dissent: The Conservative Record).

Then, Kirkby said, the charitable sector lost its invitation to speak up for the citizens they represented. And this, according to Kirkby, happed to charitable groups from all across the sector – from development organizations to women’s rights groups.

But by 2012 a new pattern emerged, one that clearly demonstrated a more narrow focus on environmental charities.

At the time, when asked about environment critics receiving federal funding, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, said, “If it’s the case that we’re spending on organizations that are doing things contrary to government policy, I think that is an inappropriate use of taxpayer’s money and we’ll look to eliminate it.”

According to Kirkby, that new trajectory was most publicly marked by former Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver’s open letter, published in the Globe and Mail in January 2012, that accused environmental groups of being ‘foreign funded radicals’ intent on ‘hijacking the regulatory process’ regarding oil pipelines.

That letter was quickly bolstered by three cabinet ministers who “compared charities to criminal organizations, terrorist organizations, [and] money launderers,” Kirkby said.

“Then [former Minister of Public Safety] Vic Towes put environmental organizations on the list of potential security threats in the government’s terrorism strategy. All of that happened in pretty rapid succession and that created a climate of vilification, of demonization of environmental groups but also a great deal of confusion in the public mind.”

The accusations were eventually topped off with an announcement that the federal government would spend the next several years — and millions of taxpayer dollars — investigating charities (many environmental), their funding and the nature of their ‘political activity.’

Silenced

What followed was a major chill in the charity world, according to Kirkby’s research. Charities clammed up and hunkered down, trying to survive the strain of sometimes back-to-back audits and looming fears over the possible backlash of any activity seen as unfavourable by the federal government.

Kirkby said in his overview of many of these charities, he found them to be generally “moderate.” He said this was in large part due to Canadians being a “moderate people” and the restrictions already in place on charities: only 10 per cent of their activity can be political in nature (no partisan activity is allowed).

Dressed in the language of ministers like Oliver, Kirkby said, the federal government “framed [political activity] very effectively as if political activities were a bad thing and had to be stopped — had to be audited and stopped.”

“But, you know,” Kirkby added, “political activities are basically something as simple as asking people call their MP about an issue they care about.”

The issue had become so contentious, however, and charities so heavily scrutinized by government, and a small but very vocal sector of society, that a lot of internal damage to groups had been done.

That created an “inward turn” according to Kirkby’s research. He found most under audit were “distracted” by the presence and pressure of auditors and began “altering the tone, content and frequency or channel of communication” with their audiences and government.

A general sense of “what are they coming for next?” diverted the majority of groups under audit from their mission, Kirkby found.

“There was a silencing,” he said. “Not a silencing, but a muzzling that occurred, as environmental and other charities wondered what was next.”

The sum of the parts

This isn’t some grand conspiracy, Kirkby noted, just the culmination of years of decision-making that advances the private sector and hurts the “third sector,” the collective of non-profits and charities serving civil society.

But intentional or not, the outcome affects democracy all the same, Kirkby concluded.

“I don’t think that there’s necessarily… some blueprint that is being followed but the accumulation of these various tactical actions results very much in damage to the vigour of our democracy,” he said.

What is clear is that the current federal government appears to “have very close ties to one sector,” Kirkby said, adding, “that’s not unprecedented in this country.” He recounted former Liberal government’s support of companies like Bombardier and Boeing.

The situation, however, has scaled up with the Harper government’s support of the oil and gas sector, Kirkby said. “So we see this really close alignment of whatever benefits the petroleum industry, benefits government, and the government seems to believe that what seems good for the petroleum industry is what is good for Canada.”

Whoever contradicts that conviction is being “bullied into muting their messages,” Kirkby said.

With these forces acting in concert, Kirkby said, “what you have is a government that is too close to a sector. It first of all seems to be using the levers of power that are available to a government – like the tax authority – to fight its policy battles.”

“When you add that up what you have is a narrowing of debate and a polarizing of viewpoints, rather than a discussion.”

About “more than just charities”

For Kirkby this issue has everything and nothing to do with charities:

“I say this isn’t about charities — and yes, it is a little about charities because they are an important part of civil society, a very important contributor to conversation — but what we’re doing, this is a problem for all of us,” he said.

“If we’re not hearing all the options on policy, if we’re not having a vigorous discussion on the way forward, we risk choosing wrong options. There has been a muzzling and silencing of particularly environmental charities, but not only environmental charities, development charities as well, at a key moment when these issues need a thorough airing.”

These issues, Kirkby said, cover everything from wealth inequality to climate change and all deserve more enriched public conversations.

“We’re at a time when we’re seeing a reduction of the middle class, and polarization around income that is very much on people’s minds; concerns about quantity and quality of jobs; we’re seeing human rights issues in Canada and internationally; we’re seeing Canadians are becoming aware that many of our mining companies are quite controversial in many of the developing countries in which they are operating.”

But at the forefront of Canada’s concerns are issues of the environment and how our natural resources are managed.

“On the environmental front we’re at a critical time when we’re considering a massive expansion of the oilsands; we’re considering multiple pipelines to take bitumen to various coasts of the United States and shipping them through inner waters, or transporting them by train and we’ve got organizations that are looking at… the impact of all these things on land-based and sea-based ecosystems and individual species, including species at risk.”

The good old days

Throughout his research, Kirkby noted a continuing trend — far outdating the current federal government — to limit the involvement and capacity of the charitable sector in policy discussions.

But this wasn’t always the case.

There was a time in Canada when citizen groups were invited to the policy table, at the highest federal level, and asked for their ideas on new programs and legislation. In the mid-twentieth century, providing federal funds to charitable groups that defended civil society, even if they were critical of government, was seen as a democratic good. That era marked the beginning of a flourishing sector of non-governmental organizations.

Not only were these groups shown early drafts of new policies — they were often invited to help craft them, giving advice and input at the earliest developmental stages.

“They used to be invited in to speak to cabinet minsters and senior bureaucrats about ideas for policies and to comment on policies as they came to light,” Kirkby said. “They largely got shut out of that way of communicating and that included environmental organizations and development organizations that had developed a strong reputation as authoritative representatives on policies.”

“It’s well-documented by researchers and academics that for 30 years there has been a gradual reduction in reach of non-profit sector and of civil society organizations,” Kirkby said. By the 1980s and thereafter, “there was less recognition of the representative nature of the organizations and more seeing them as service delivery vehicles on contract to the government.”

Eventually funding cuts and the establishment of new ‘priorities’ for the charitable and non-profit sector forced many of these groups out of the government’s inner circle. Given time, the charitable sector was increasingly seen as an outsider to government, even an obstacle to certain government agendas.

“There was a tendency to pull back and say that the only legitimate representation to the government were elected officials,” Kirkby explained. “The rest were special interest groups.”

“And though they may have some good ideas, the government felt it could pick and choose when and how and if it would listen to them. We’ve seen a corresponding loss of access to comment on government policies that were in formulation including in really early idea formulation of what public policy should be.”

And that access is just what is needed to ensure Canadians are getting the kind of policies they deserve.

As Allan Northcott, vice president of the Calgary-based Max Bell Foundation, recently wrote for The Philanthropist, charities have brought Canadians some of the most basic policies we get to take for granted every day.

Laws against drunk driving, regulating tobacco, protecting baby products from bisphenol-A, mental health services, the Boreal Forest Agreement — these are just some of the benefits society gains from the hard work of nonprofits and charities.

“But, of course,” Northcott writes, “our collective safety and security, well-being, and prosperity do not appear out of thin air.”

With charities under increased scrutiny, for better or for worse Canadians are becoming increasingly aware of that.

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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.”

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.

Do democracy and freedom begin at home for Prime Minister Stephen Harper?

Recently the Prime Minister told Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych he will be judged on his actions, not words, as violence against the country’s pro-democracy protesters steadily escalates. Harper signed a joint statement at the North American leaders summit in Toluca, Mexico, saying “[the leaders] agreed they will continue to monitor the situation closely to ensure that actions mirror words.”

The Prime Minister also called for an emergency debate in Parliament this week, saying “we understand that this violence is occurring because the majority of the population is very worried about the steps taken by their government that very much remind them of their anti-democratic and Soviet past.”

While Canadians will no doubt be relieved to see the country and its leadership take a meaningful stance against the oppression and violence of President Yanukovych’s regime, there’s sure to be some cognitive dissonance associated with Harper as a ‘democracy-for-the-people’ spokesperson here at home.

In fact, Harper has been throwing his political weight around a lot lately. Including during a trip to Israel.

In January Harper addressed the Knesset in Jerusalem during a high profile trip where he lavished praise on Israel as a bastion of democracy in a troubled region. (You can see the fully edited and polished Harper-esque version on the Prime Minister’s new newsfeed 24/7).

During his address Harper scattered the words “democracy” or “democratic” more than 10 times in the relatively short speech. The word “freedom” was also liberally applied as he lauded Israel’s leadership.

Interestingly, Harper threw in a little aside about political dissent when he said, “no state is beyond legitimate questioning or criticism. Indeed, Israel as a democratic state makes such criticism a part of your national life.”

It’s refreshing to see a Canadian leader sticking up for democratic values abroad and one can argue more leaders should do it. But wouldn’t it be nice if Harper also supported some of those high-minded values at home?

At least it would be good to know how Harper defines “legitimate questioning or criticism” here at home when it comes to, say, energy development or pipeline infrastructure in Canada. Are criticisms still legitimate if they come from environmentalists or First Nations groups?

Because when you look back over the past several years you can see all calls for democracy are equal when it comes to the Harper government; just some calls are more equal than others.

Harper has his own unique style of suppressing democratic dissent in this country, a particular flare for beefing up the executive and legislative branches of power in order to hold 'democracy' in check. All things in moderation, after all. 

Take the scaled-up attack on charities as an example.

Federal tax authorities are aggressively auditing some of the government’s most articulate and pointed critics, including the David Suzuki Foundation, Environmental Defence, the Pembina Foundation, and the Ecology Action Centre.

We now know that Ottawa is giving the Canada Revenue Agency a cool $13.4 million to investigate charitable organizations, a probe that will now extend beyond 2017, according to documents obtained by DeSmog Canada through Access to Information legislation. The investigation spending in an otherwise parsimonious budget is a sharp boost from the $8 million publically announced in the 2012 budget.

But it could pay off. Ottawa seems to have a new victim.

Environmental Defence, which has been “working since 1984 to protect Canadians' environment and human health,” is on the verge of losing its charitable status under the taxman’s probe. Another organization, Physicians for Global Survival, was the first organization to loose its charitable status – the one group out of over 900 investigated.

"They have told us that, yes, more or less that they consider that things that we've been doing for 30 years are things that they now feel are not charitable," Tim Gray, the executive director of Environmental Defence, said in a Toronto Sun report.

This haranguing against green groups has deep roots. Harper and his ministers have long worked to link environmental organizations to terrorism or to mischaracterize groups as fronts for well-funded American interests that threaten Canadian domestic energy supplies.

“I think we’ll see significant American interests trying to line up against the Northern Gateway project, precisely because it’s not in the interests of the United States. It’s in the interests of Canada,” Harper said in 2012, as recounted in the book, The Longer I’m Prime Minister.

“They’ll funnel money through environmental groups and others in order to slow it down,” he said.

The sentiment is strange when you consider the oilsands are important for American oil interests, as is evidenced in the drawn out battle for the Keystone XL pipeline, destined to supply U.S. refineries with Albertan oil. The resentment of foreign interests also seems misplaced when you consider growing Chinese ownership in the oilsands and significant Chinese state investment in the Northern Gateway pipeline.

One this is certain: it was after these anti-environmental group statements that the Harper government directed the Canada Revenue Agency to target the legitimate dissent of some of Canada’s most prominent and respected environmental charities.

Columnist Mitchell Anderson, writing in the Tyee, opened a recent column with a pointed question: “Is Canada getting creepy?”

Mitchell outlined the CSIS affair, including Chuck Strahl’s resignation as chair of the Security Intelligence Review Committee, watchdog for the country’s powerful spying apparatus. Strahl resigned after his role as a lobbyist for the Northern Gateway pipeline project came to light. As Mitchell wrote, this was “an obvious conflict given that CSIS was spying on anti-pipeline activists – in partnership with the RCMP and private oil companies.”

At the same time as the crackdown on the environmental NGO sector, the Harper government has also vanished some of Canada’s most crucial environmental laws, expedited approvals for major energy projects and defanged the National Energy Board, which now has strict limits on how the public can participate in the project review process.

Critics have accused the Harper government of engaging in undemocratic politics. This lengthy list, compiled by Lawrence Martin, outlines all the times this government was found to behave in anti-democratic ways (contempt of Parliament, prorogation of Parliament, weakened watchdogs, abuse of process, suppression of research, document tampering and more) at a time when 62 per cent of Canadians felt the country was in a state of crisis.

That was in 2011, before the Harper government won its majority. By all accounts things have only gotten worse.

So while we’re working hard to protect civil dissent and promote democracy worldwide, let’s not forget to fight for the same at home.

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.