Last summer, activity at The Narwhal was thrumming.

Having just launched a few months prior, we were experiencing rapid growth in our readership, in the number of pitches and tips we were receiving and interest from new writers, photojournalists and filmmakers.

It was an exhilarating time, made all the more exciting by the fact that during those few months we had reporters in the Arctic tundra to report on climate change, at a caribou maternity pen in northeastern B.C., trekking out of cell-range in the backcountry of Tahltan territory to learn about local Indigenous perspectives on mining and yet another on a boat witnessing changes to Canada’s largest (and most endangered) national park.

In-depth investigative journalism on energy and the environment requires witnessing the effects of policies on the real world, first-hand. But it also involves research — a lot of research.

So, we were spending plenty of time digging into spreadsheets and freedom of information requests during those early months, too: tracing the influence of corporate money from the coal industry on air-quality research at the University of Alberta, tracking the environmental liabilities taxpayers could face from mining in B.C. and surfacing documents that showed how energy giants were getting breaks from fines levied in response to environmental violations.

Our tiny staff (which, at the time, amounted to about three full-time employee equivalents) was tearing at the seams.

Which is why it felt like an outsized commitment of our resources to send two of our team members — legislative reporter Sarah Cox and our managing editor, Carol Linnitt — out to Langley, B.C., to learn about some ugly baby owls.

These ugly babies are at the centre of the world’s only captive breeding program for the critically endangered spotted owl. Working around the clock with the exhaustion and commitment of new parents, young scientists are trying to stem the tide of extinction in those meagre labs and aviaries.

All the while, a lingering, uncomfortable reality is gnawing away at the important gains being made there.

While hundreds of thousands of public dollars are being channeled into the recovery of this once-prolific species, their habitat continues to be destroyed — primarily through logging that has continued in British Columbia for as long as the province has been around.

What would happen if no reporter was there to investigate the connections between those dots?

A million species face extinction

A report released by the UN this week found the natural world is being destroyed at a rate tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the past 10 million years. Up to a million species are facing extinction worldwide.

The spotted owl’s habitat extends up the western United States and ends in British Columbia, where only an estimated handful of the birds exist in the wild.

A similar fate is shared by the southern mountain caribou whose B.C. habitat extends south past the border, dipping down into Montana. In January 2019, the last caribou herds to share that cross-border habitat were declared extirpated — locally extinct — heralding the end of the last wild caribou in the contiguous United States.

Although these species are localized, the grief at their loss is not.

While creatures like spotted owls and caribou rely on specific habitat for their survival, the contributing causes of that habitat’s loss — like climate change or deforestation — are often non-specific and widely distributed.

These challenges are huge, they’re shared — and they’re inherently global.

As we step further into a future contoured by human activity and sure to be marred by further loss of animal and plant species, the underlying connections between the policy, industries, and environmental impacts that lead to these outcomes are increasingly obfuscated.

In other words: it’s more important than ever to make sure someone is there to connect the dots.

Report locally. Be read (and valued) globally

The Narwhal exists, fundamentally, to be a dot connector.

We work to report on Canadian stories in a way that investigates the connections between cause and effect, that digs deeper to understand root challenges.

Our reporting recognizes that climate change is a global concern, that watersheds cross borders and that species don’t recognize international boundaries. Reporting on the environment, we’re faced with an everyday reminder that the local is global in all sorts of surprising, ecologically reverberating ways.

The more we recognize that interconnectivity, the less we feel the impulse to recognize the boundaries that, in other frames of mind, might feel absolute.

Are we building walls? Or are we recognizing a greater integration with humanity and the creatures with which we share this planet?

It’s the latter feeling that might lead one to donate to refugee aid efforts at the United Nations, to support clean water initiatives in developing nations or to pitch in for that quirky Kickstarter for some filmmaker or boat-builder whose life is seemingly quite distant from our own.

We can understand these efforts as important, as worthy of our attention and our dollars, even if their impacts are being felt by others miles away and even if they’re on the other side of a border (or many).

Just as Canadians are connecting with meaningful endeavours all over the planet, so too are people from around the world connecting to efforts here in Canada.

The Narwhal — we’re delighted to say — is one of these efforts.

How is The Narwhal funded?

Much fuss is being made these days about Canadian non-profit organizations that receive funding from abroad.

We’ve written on that subject before, but we want to explain further what this looks like for The Narwhal, a Canadian non-profit that receives support from Canada and around the world.

For starters, let us state: transparency is one of the pillars of our news organization. In 2017, when we were operating under our old name DeSmog Canada, we instituted a donor transparency policy and were awarded a five-star rating by Transparify, an initiative that promotes financial transparency at NGOs.

In the spring of 2019, The Narwhal became the sole Canadian member of the Institute for Nonprofit News, a network of more than 200 non-profit news organizations. We were accepted as a member because we meet the institute’s rigorous standards for editorial independence and financial transparency.

Our editorial independence policy outlines clearly that while we’re happy to receive support from individuals and organizations alike, we maintain all control of editorial coverage. That means no one — no funder, no imaginary billionaire, no government, no company, no potential donor — has any say in how we tell a story, who we interview or the facts we uncover.

Each year, we publish a disclosure of all donors who give more than $5,000. For the financial year that ended Sept. 30, 2018, our total budget was $423,065.

Our largest source of support, as in the previous two years, was the Seattle-based Wilburforce Foundation. Wilburforce was founded by Rose Letwin in 1991 and supports Letwin’s vision of sustaining wild places by investing in science-based solutions. This includes supporting thriving, interconnected ecosystems — ecosystems that often cross borders.

The second largest source of support for The Narwhal in 2018 was reader donations, which totalled $82,432 from 711 readers who gave either monthly or one-time donations. Our readers are our fastest-growing source of revenue and we expect (hope!) revenue from reader donations will double in 2019. (Pssst, join the party.)

Our third-largest source of support was the Oak Foundation, which got its start in the 1980s provinding funds for torture victims, single mothers and vulnerable children in Europe and Africa. Today, the Switzerland-based foundation funds issues of social and environmental concern around the world with special projects on democracy and grassroots organizing in Brazil, India and Zimbabwe.

We also received support from the Victoria-based Salal Foundation, the European Climate Foundation and funding through LUSH Cosmetics’ charity pot program.

All of these individuals and organizations value the work that we do here at The Narwhal.

It’s also important to note that, because of this support, The Narwhal doesn’t advertise diet pills or allow flashing ads for shoes or cars to flood your screen when you visit our site. We get hundreds of requests to publish paid content, written by marketers, every month — but we have never needed to lower the quality of our publication this way, thanks to the people who support our mission of providing high-quality, public interest journalism.

But how does The Narwhal use that money?

The funding we receive from these individuals and organizations directly supports our independent reporting on Canadian issues that matter.

It supports our incredible team of writers, editors, photographers and videographers who cover Canada’s natural environment in a fresh and in-depth way few traditional publications do these days.

One thing that money does not do is line shareholders’ pockets.

Our non-profit model is relatively rare in Canada, but very common south of the border, where well-established investigative journalism outlets such as ProPublica, the Center for Investigative Reporting, Mother Jones and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting operate as non-profit organizations and receive philanthropic funding.

The Narwhal is a part of this new breed of news outlets that are able to put reader engagement and the public interest ahead of private interests and advertising dollars.

While some people like to cast aspersions about funding crossing borders in the non-profit world, the reality is we live in a global society with global problems and global financial systems.

We can’t help but look at the fact that many of our major corporations, public institutions and, heck, major newspapers rely on non-Canadian funds.

Just like many Canadians contribute to causes abroad, it should come as no surprise that philanthropists interested in slowing global climate change and saving wild places are contributing to work happening in Canada — where some of the world’s last contiguous tracts of wilderness persist.

Right now we need to be telling bigger and more challenging stories that draw deeper and harder connections about our place in this world. Journalists are at the frontlines of that work and yet many newspapers in Canada have eliminated the positions of their environment reporters.

We’re working to fill that void.

We’re working to provide in-depth reporting on some of the most pressing issues of our time.

We’re proud that The Narwhal’s journalism has been recognized across the country, through awards and nominations from the Canadian Association of Journalists, the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards.

And we’re incredibly grateful to our supporters both in Canada and from around the world who help make this work possible.  

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.

On a certain level, Vivian Krause and her cadre are right when they accuse Canadian non-profits of taking foreign money. American philanthropists do give money to Canadian non-profits.

There’s just one thing: it’s neither surprising nor clandestine.

The success of their argument comes down to one simple trick: strip away all relevant context and then replace it with conspiracy.

So let’s start with some context.

In case you’ve been living in a bunker for the past few decades, it’s 2018 now and we live in a global society with global problems. Of course philanthropists who are interested in, say, slowing global climate change, protecting the boreal forest or saving wild salmon, are interested in work happening in Canada.

(If slowing global climate change or saving wild salmon don’t seem like worthwhile goals to you, congratulations, you’re part of just 11 per cent of Canadians who are utterly unmoved by science. You probably want to just stop reading right now to get a headstart on writing your hate mail.)

For the rest of you science-loving people, here are some fun facts:

• Canada’s boreal forest represents 25 per cent of the world’s remaining intact forest, leading the world alongside the Amazon.
• Canada has the third-largest proven oil reserve in the world, most of which is in the oilsands.
• Canada is the world’s fifth-largest producer and fourth-largest exporter of natural gas, according to Natural Resources Canada.
• Scientists say most of Canada’s oil will need to be left mostly unexploited if we’re to avoid baking ourselves — something almost every country in the world has committed to trying its utmost at.

These facts make Canada a really central player in the future of, well, this planet we live on. They also make for some legitimately difficult conversations about what we ought to do with that knowledge.

The reality is Canada is a major battleground in the fight against climate change right now. Oil and gas companies from all over the world are trying to extract our resources ASAP, scientists and public interest groups are arguing we need to stop expanding fossil fuel infrastructure, the traditional media is in a state of collapse and politicians are doing what they do best: playing political theatre.

All of this context is conveniently stripped away in a piece published in the National Post last week, with this headline: Canadians are realizing foreign groups sabotaged our energy economy — for no good reason.

The article’s author, Suzanne Anton, the former attorney general and minister of justice for British Columbia, invokes Krause-ian logic and manages to use the word “foreign” six times in this little ditty. (That’s a heckuva lot more than the word was used in former Natural Resource Minister Joe Oliver’s original ‘foreign-funded radicals’ open letter that catapulted this whole line of argument into the mainstream.)

Okay fiiine, we’ll talk about “foreign” influence if you insist, Ms. Anton.

Let’s start with the National Post itself. The National Post is owned by Postmedia, which is owned by U.S. hedge fund lenders who hold 98 per cent of Postmedia’s shares.

Next. While in power, Anton’s BC Liberals fought to keep the country’s weakest political donation rules intact. Those rules allowed donations from — you guessed it — foreigners, as well as unlimited donations from anyone, including corporations of the foreign variety to flood into the political arena and influence elected leaders.

Free from any restraints on donations, the BC Liberals raised $12 million in 2016, more money than any other provincial party in power in Canada — earning B.C. the dubious title of the “wild west” of political financing.

Between 2008 and 2015, 48 fossil fuel companies and associated industry groups donated $5.2 million to B.C. political parties, 92 per cent of which went to the BC Liberals.

If Anton was so concerned about foreign influence, you’d think she’d have a problem with all of this foreign money flowing into her party’s coffers, but nope. There was nary a squeak back then.

You’d also think Anton would be up in arms about Kinder Morgan Canada, the Canadian subsidiary of foreign-owned Kinder Morgan that is proposing an oil pipeline from Alberta’s oilsands to B.C.’s coast. The Texas-based company was co-founded by Richard Kinder, who served as president of Enron until 1996, and his fellow Enron alumnus Bill Morgan. Instead of being outraged, Anton’s Liberals accepted $560,000 in political donations from Kinder Morgan and other companies connected to the pipeline sector.

But let’s not stop there. What about the oilsands themselves? A 2012 analysis by ForestEthics found 71 per cent of the ownership of the oilsands was, well, foreign. In the past couple of years, international companies have sold off more than $30 billion of oilsands assets to Canadian-based (although not necessarily Canadian-owned) firms, shifting those numbers somewhat, but the point remains: where’s the outrage over foreign ownership of Canadian natural resources?

It doesn’t stop at oil. There are a bevy of foreign-owned LNG companies looking for a piece of B.C.’s coast, too. Anton was decidedly silent when Indonesian-based Woodfibre LNG donated $58,500 to the BC Liberals between 2014 and 2016 and later became embroiled in an illegal donations scandal.

So yes, money is crossing borders. Organizations like Greenpeace, WWF and 350.org fundraise globally and have offices in many countries. Is it surprising? Not in the slightest. Are you allowed to disagree with them? Sure. Just don’t base it on some dubious argument about how they’re funded.

If you rewind about a decade, you can find a much different narrative about philanthropic donations from abroad. In 2007, Conservative environment minister John Baird welcomed a $60 million contribution — mostly from U.S. philanthropists — to protect B.C.’s Great Bear Rainforest. He even credited the money as being crucial in Ottawa’s decision to contribute $30 million to the plan.

Philanthropists from around the world are interested in protecting the Great Bear Rainforest because it’s the largest intact coastal temperate rainforest in the world.

Philanthropists from around the world are interested in Canada maybe not plundering all of its oil and gas as fast as possible, because the impacts of climate change are felt, well, everywhere, especially in poorer countries.

Philanthropists from around the world are interested in funding non-profit journalism like ours because they care about things like conserving wildlife habitat and climate change. (We disclose our funders on our website and have an editorial independence policy in place to make it crystal clear that we cede no editorial control to those who support us.)

There are plenty of really difficult conversations we need to have as Canadians about our energy future. How environmental non-profits are being funded frankly isn’t one of them. But hey, it’s an effective distraction technique.

You see, while the B.C. media establishment was having a field day over a hum-drum internal strategy memo written by a Canadian 350.org staffer and the fact the Minister of Environment met with, ummm, environmentalists, Kinder Morgan was busy meeting with the federal government five times.

Kinder Morgan also didn’t waste any time in meeting with the new B.C. government after it came into office in July. Just three days after the NDP became government, Kinder Morgan lobbyist Mark Reder of FleishmanHillard HighRoad Corp. met with Attorney General David Eby, Minister of Environment and Climate Change Strategy George Heyman, Premier John Horgan’s chief of staff Geoff Meggs and with Minister of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources Michelle Mungall.

Which brings me to my final point: to paint the oil industry as an underdog in this discourse is absurd. Even Alberta Oil Magazine printed an opinion piece calling on the oil industry to stop paying attention to Krause’s conspiracy.

“Readers may find it difficult to believe that an industry which exported product worth $129 billion in 2014 — whose members include some of the biggest players in the national economy, players who could easily outspend American charities by a factor of a hundred — can feel like victims of the environmental movement, but they do,” Markham Hislop wrote.

Instead of working to minimize the concerns of citizens by painting them as “foreign funded activists,” we’d all be a lot better off if we spent that time thinking about why civil society is in such a state of distress over new fossil fuel infrastructure, such as Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline.

French thinker Rene Girard offers some insights there. He says a scapegoat removes the need to look at ourselves. In this case, there’s clearly something amongst us that really needs to be worked out.

Updated 8 a.m. March 30, 2018, to include additional information about donations from Kinder Morgan and its associates to the BC Liberals.

Updated 4 p.m. March 31, 2018, to indicate foreign ownership numbers in the Canadian oilsands have shifted in recent years.

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.

Vivian Krause has spent years scrutinizing how Canadian environmental groups are funded, claiming she's just asking "fair questions."

But as the blogger-turned-newspaper-columnist has run rampant with her conspiracy theory that American charitable foundations' support of Canadian environmental groups is nefarious, she has continually avoided seeking a fair answer.

If Krause were seeking a fair answer, she'd quickly learn that both investment dollars and philanthropic dollars cross borders all the time. There isn’t anything special or surprising about environmental groups receiving funding from U.S. foundations that share their goals — especially when the increasingly global nature of environmental challenges, particularly climate change, is taken into consideration.

Despite this common-sense answer, Krause’s strategy has effectively diverted attention away from genuine debate of environmental issues, while simultaneously undermining the important role environmental groups play in Canadian society.

Creating Diversions a Trademark of Oil Industry Strategy

This diversion strategy is a well-known tactic of the oil industry. A strategy document leaked yesterday details how one of the world’s most powerful PR firms, Edelman, advised TransCanada to undermine opponents to the Energy East pipeline.

Edelman recommended TransCanada apply pressure to opponents by “distracting them from their mission and causing them to redirect their resources.” To achieve that, Edelman advises TransCanada to work with “supportive third parties who can in turn put the pressure on, particularly when TransCanada can’t.”

Sound familiar?

In Vivian Krause's resume, she proudly takes credit for spawning a Senate inquiry and Canada Revenue Agency audit — distractions that forced environmental groups to spend time defending themselves, rather than doing their important work as watchdogs and advocates for environmental protection.

While Krause has been busy maligning the funding of Canadian environmental groups, very little attention has been paid to where Krause gets her bread buttered.

Krause Receives 90% of Income From Resource Industries

Krause frequently claims her research is independent (PDF) and that her work is unaffiliated with any industry — yet she has admitted that since 2012, more than 90 per cent of her income has come from oil, gas and mining interests through honorariums and speaking fees.

Krause has been paid as much as $10,000 to speak to energy executives. While she may not be directly employed by the fossil fuel industry, her work certainly aligns with that industry’s interests.

Groups paying Krause speaker’s fees included the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, the Association for Mineral Exploration and the Vancouver Board of Trade.

Large speaking fees are increasingly being used as a handy way to support the work of industry allies without directly employing them.

To see just how contentious speaking fees can be, take a gander at the recent Rex Murphy or Peter Mansbridge controversies. CBC ended up adjusting its policy, requiring hosts to disclose their speaking fees.

What Was Vivian Krause’s Argument Again?

So let’s get this straight: Krause, who has relied on speaking fees from the multinational resource sector for 90 per cent of her income for the past three years, argues that Canada’s environmental organizations are fronts for U.S. interests because they receive a portion of their funding from across the border?

Despite the spurious logic, Krause is still given a platform to spread her misleading information in the Postmedia chain of newspapers, including the Financial Post and The Province, as well as on Global News shows where she's a regular panelist on Unfiltered with Jill Krop.

While Krause may spin a mysterious tale, the answer is simple: philanthropic dollars crossing borders to support work on global issues is the norm. And Canadian charities are required to disclose all significant donations from foreign sources annually.

The Real Debate Canada Needs

The continued debate over the funding sources of the environmental community is simply a diversion tactic that favours the fossil fuel industry's desire to avoid having the real debate about Canada’s energy future.

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change urges nations to phase out fossil fuels immediately to avoid the worst impacts of global warming.

The report puts responsibility squarely on the shoulders of our elected leaders, saying they can “either put policies in place to achieve this essential shift, or they can spend the rest of their careers dealing with climate disaster after climate disaster.”

But Canada won’t meet its 2020 international climate target, according to Environment Commissioner Julie Gelfand.

“The federal government does not have an overall plan that maps out how Canada will achieve this target. Canadians have not been given the details about which regulations will be developed, when, nor what greenhouse gas reductions will be expected,” Gelfand wrote in a report last month.

Now that China and the U.S. have signed a deal agreeing to cut emissions, Canada is left with even fewer excuses not to act.

Meantime, the federal government’s mandate to advance an energy superpower agenda marches forth, resulting in controversy across the country — from the Kinder Morgan fiasco on Burnaby Mountain, to the First Nations legal battle against Enbridge Northern Gateway, to the Athabasca Chipewyan and Beaver Lake Cree First Nations’ fight to prevent oilsands expansion on their territory, to efforts to ban fracking in Nova Scotia.

These efforts are not the outcome of foreign conspiracy — they’re the outcome of a lack of any sensible national conversation about how to develop our natural resources while meeting our international climate change commitments.

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.