Alberta Conservative Senator Doug Black worries that Canadians are illiterate when it comes to energy and he’s on a mission to educate them.

“If we don’t address the issues facing us now,” he warns, “the prosperity my generation enjoyed will not be enjoyed by the next generation.”

Black is a rarity in the Senate, one of only three senators who were elected by voters in Alberta and then appointed to the Senate by Stephen Harper. Given the discredit that august body has fallen into, though, he may not hold that seat for long.

During the first half of 2015, Black travelled from coast to coast in his quest to educate Canadians about “the development of our energy resources and to discuss ways in which Canada can responsibly maximize its energy resources to benefit all Canadians.”

But it’s an odd crusade. Instead of meeting Canadians where they mostly congregate, in malls, union halls, church basements and community centres, he’s meeting them in posh hotels like the Vancouver Four Seasons, Toronto’s One King West, Edmonton Westin, Montreal Hyatt Regency and Ottawa’s Shaw Centre.

[view:in_this_series=block_1] Black’s Energy Tour

That’s because his “energy literacy tour” isn’t aimed at ordinary Canadians, but at the elites, the people who are already well-educated about energy, at least from the industry perspective. The tour is sponsored by the Economic Club of Canada, whose “audience members are drawn from the most senior levels of Canadian business, industry and government,” the club’s web site informs us.

The site features testimonials from the president of the Canadian Gas Association, the chief lobbyist for the Toronto-Dominion Bank (also a director of the Canadian-American Business Council), and the communications director for an oil and gas service corporation.

They’re certainly up to snuff on energy literacy, which raises the suspicion that the purpose of Black’s meetings with the elite is to promote the industry and further the development of Alberta’s oilsands.

And the Economic Council of Canada has set up blue ribbon panels of industry insiders and experts to help devise strategies to achieve this goal. The Toronto session in April, for instance included executives from Enbridge and Kinder Morgan along with Brian Tobin, vice-chair of the Bank of Montreal (BMO) and former premier of oil-rich Newfoundland and Labrador.

At that meeting Tobin worried that foreign investment is moving to the United States, where the investment review regime is more “flexible” than Canada’s. And Tobin would know about the problems foreign investors face in Canada: BMO acted as an adviser to China’s state-owned CNOOC in its contentious $15.1-billion takeover of oil and gas producer Nexen in 2013.

Kinder Morgan Canada’s Ian Anderson, who was also on the speaker’s bill, said he couldn’t understand why “a couple of hundred” protestors would want to hold up his company’s plans to build a pipeline under Burnaby Mountain. “Where is this opposition coming from?” he asked his audience. “What fear is motivating it?”

But instead of addressing why so many Canadians fear growing oilsands development, the energy elite, with Black in the vanguard, pushed back.

Advancing “Dialogue” on Energy Future

Black, who is one of Canada’s top oil and gas lawyers, has been immersed in the industry for decades and has many leading oil and gas executives as clients. He’s also a senior Alberta Progressive Conservative fundraiser and the party’s former finance vice-president, and he’s not afraid to admit he represents Big Oil in the Senate.

“One of the reasons I ran for the Senate,” he states on his web site, “was to advance a national dialogue on our energy future.” But is it a monologue rather than a dialogue he’s advancing?

Black heard his clients venting their incredulity over the way the public was showing such intense opposition to energy infrastructure, as Alberta Oil magazine explains. How could the public be so ignorant as to not see the connection between energy development and prosperity, the oil executives demanded to know.

So Black set out the make the connection. In 2009 he co-founded the Energy Policy Institute of Canada (EPIC), an organization with “a singular focus on one task: to draft an energy strategy.” It was almost like a service to his clients and the industry.

This rather benign sounding goal masked the real purpose of the organization, which Linda McQuaig saw as “a lobbying vehicle for dozens of extremely wealthy, powerful fossil fuel companies … all hell-bent on developing Alberta’s tar sands.”

Members included the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, Canadian Gas Association, EnCana, Imperial Oil, Shell Canada, TransCanada Corp., and many others.

Industry Drafting Legislation

The group released its strategy in 2012 after three years of discussions and meetings with various governments and industry interests. It was pooh-poohed by the corporate media, but an analysis by the ForestEthics Advocacy Association reveals that the oil industry — through EPIC — helped write the rules “that now restrict public participation on the environmental impacts of tar sands expansion projects.” ForestEthics documents the profound impact the EPIC report had in at least one crucial area of energy development — government regulation.

EPIC recommended that the “federal government must develop regulations that restrict participation in federal environmental assessment reviews to those parties that are ‘directly and adversely affected’ by the proposal in question.”

It also recommended that “the relevance and credibility of evidence presented for environmental assessments must be explained.” This precise language is now found in the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act 2012, on the National Energy Board’s website, and on the National Energy Board Application to Participate Form, ForestEthics notes. It’s just one example of many in the report.

Such a cooperative government response could be due to the efforts of EPIC’s co-chair, Bruce Carson, a long-time Tory insider who had been a senior aide in Harper’s PMO. Carson brought EPIC’s’ document to Nigel Wright, Harper’s chief of staff, who promised to read it “over the weekend” and urged Carson to “feel free to give me a call at any time.”

Carson reported back to Black that he’d briefed Wright, who “seemed generally supportive.”

“Excellent, Need Nigel on side,” Black responded.

A year later, Carson, who earned a $120,000 annual honorarium for his work, was charged with engaging in illegal lobbying and influence peddling, because he broke the five-year ban on lobbying after leaving the government’s employ, among other charges. Meanwhile Black became a senator and took his seat on the Senate Committee on Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources, where he could continue his work.

He outlined his mission in his maiden speech to the Senate:

All interested parties now agree that on an urgent basis we must find ways to export our energy products and to help educate Canadians about the importance of market access. For success, we need Canadians to accept that their future prosperity depends on our solving this problem. We must ensure that governments and energy producers have the social licence needed to make the critical infrastructure projects.

Black’s History of Industry Lobbying

Black has fronted for Big Oil before. In 2002 he was chief lobbyist for the Canadian Coalition for Responsible Environmental Solutions, a group that appeared on the scene several months before the Jean Chrétien government prepared to ratify the Kyoto Accord. The CCRES was created by Burson-Marsteller, the PR giant that specializes in creating astroturf organizations.

The organization was framed as “a broad cross-section of Canadian industry,” but the money came from Black’s clients in Big Oil. CCRES pulled all the stops in its efforts to derail Kyoto, including expensive saturation TV ads in Ontario. But it couldn’t prevent Chrétien from proceeding with ratification.

Not that it mattered. A decade later, Black’s party was in charge in Ottawa, Kyoto was ancient history, and Black was still furthering Big Oil’s interests, this time by educating Canadians about the need for oil pipelines if we want continued prosperity.

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A group of citizens fighting to speak about climate change and the oilsands at National Energy Board (NEB) reviews of pipeline projects, like the current Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline, are taking their battle all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada.

The group, comprised of landowners, academics, owners of business and many others, filed a constitutional challenge against the NEB’s restrictive policies that limit public participation and prevent discussion of climate and upstream oil and gas activities.

The purpose of taking the challenge to the Supreme Court “is to ask that Court to direct the NEB to do its job properly," David Martin, legal counsel, explained in a statement.

“The NEB's claim that it cannot consider scientific evidence regarding the long term impacts of the export of bitumen is simply wrong," Martin said.

"Instead the NEB is making a misguided choice to adopt an unconstitutionally narrow interpretation of its jurisdiction so as to avoid having to address the real competing public interests that pipeline approval applications necessarily entail."

In 2012, the federal government amended the National Energy Board Act, giving the NEB the final say in major infrastructure projects including pipelines.

The change, made through the infamous omnibus budget bill C-38, was accompanied by new rules limiting the length of hearings, who can participate in those hearings and what they can speak about.

“Given the potential environmental and health impacts of these pipeline projects, full public hearings on the merits and risks of the proposals are necessary to properly assess the public interest. This is precisely what the NEB has refused to do,” Martin said.

Over 468 individuals were prevented from participating in the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline hearing process in April 2014. A group of 27 climate experts were prevented from participating on the basis that they wanted to dicuss the implications of the project for Canada's climate targets. 

The following month a small group including ForestEthics Advocacy Association and long-time environmentalist and author Tzeporah Berman, filed two motions with the NEB, challenging the constitutionality of the board’s exclusion of members of the public.

The NEB struck down the motions in October 2014, stating public hearings are not a forum for free expression.

Following a failed attempt to challenge the NEB in the Federal Court of Appeals, the group was left with no choice but to seek leave for appeal at the highest level in the Supreme Court of Canada.

“Due to rising public concern, the new CEO of the NEB Peter Watson has been touring the country telling Canadians the NEB does not have the mandate to look at issues related to climate change, and this is simply untrue,” Berman, applicant in the Supreme Court challenge, said.

“This case makes it clear that the Harper government gave them the mandate in Bill C-38 when they eliminated independent environmental assessments and gave the NEB broad jurisdiction to consider environmental impacts.”

The group argues the NEB’s role in assessing the long-term impacts of projects like pipelines — including expansion of the oilsands and associated climate impacts — “is a quintessential issue of national importance.”

Public participation in such assessments, the group also states, “is essential to democracy under the rule of law, particularly in a country whose economy and future is closely tied to the intelligent exploitation of our natural resources.” 

The Supreme Court of Canada has the authority to review any decisions made in the Federal Court of Appeal that involves matters of public importance.

The group advancing the challenge hopes the Supreme Court will restore the purpose of the NEB Act, to enable public participation and include public interest in a long-term assessment of major infrastructure projects like pipelines.

The decision will affect not only the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, but will have implications for the Enbridge Line 9 project planned to carry oilsands crude between Ontario and Quebec as well as TransCanada’s Energy East pipeline, a massive project projected to carry more than 1 million barrels of oilsands crude to export facilities in New Brunswick each day.

Last month a coalition of groups including 350.org and LeadNow delivered a petition signed by more than 100,000 Canadians that demanded the NEB consider climate change in its review of the Energy East oilsands pipeline project.

Image Credit: Zhu via Flickr

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On July 6th, 2013, one year ago today, a train carrying oil derailed in the sleepy Quebec town of Lac-Mégantic, resulting in an explosion so wild and so hot it leveled several city blocks and incinerated the bodies of many of its 47 victims. The accident put the tiny town on the international media circuit and dragged a new social concern with it: oil trains.

Whether you call them oil trains, tanker trains or bomb trains, chances are you didn’t call them anything at all before this day last year.

Before the tragedy of Lac-Mégantic, several smaller tanker train accidents across North America had already raised alarm over the danger of transporting oil and other fuels by rail in small communities with tracks often running through city centres and residential areas.

In the wake of Lac-Mégantic, however, critics, environmental organizations, journalists and concerned communities began tracking the growing movement of volatile oil shipments across the continent.

Keeping pace with oil transport

Overall shipments of oil by rail have increased by 28,000 per cent since 2009.

In 2012 nearly 40,000 barrels of oil were shipped to the U.S. each day, although surging oil production in the Bakken Shale has simultaneously led to an increase of oil by rail shipments of crude north of the border.

In 2013 oil train accidents resulted in more than 1.15 million gallons of spilled oil. This represents a 50-fold increase over the yearly average between 1975 and 2012.

According to some, the surge in rail transport of petroleum products has outpaced regulatory oversight. Lax oversight may have contributed to the devastation at Lac-Mégantic, according to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA).

In an October 2013 report, author Bruce Campbell, the CCPA’s executive director, wrote, “In my view, the evidence points to a fundamentally flawed regulatory system, cost-cutting corporate behaviour that jeopardized public safety and the environment, and responsibility extending to the highest levels of corporate management and government policy making.”

According to Transport Safety Board of Canada data, accidents involving dangerous goods have increased since last year.

Screen grab of TSB Canada data complied by CTV News. 

Poor tank design, poorer response plan

According to CN Rail chief executive Claude Monegau, poor tank car design was “one of the most important systematic issues” leading to the tragedy in Lac-Mégantic. Earlier this year a Canadian government-commissioned rail safety group said more needed to be done to ensure the safety of oil tanker cars carrying crude through communities.

Since then the government has implemented a plan to upgrade or retire generic oil tanker cars, known as DOT-111s. In February there were roughly 228,000 DOT-111 cars in operation across North American and 92,000 of those were carrying flammable liquids.

Civil engineering expert and professor Roza Galvez-Cloutier, who examined the derailment in Lac-Mégantic, recently said no appropriate plans or equipment are in place to prevent a similar situation from recurring in Canada.

“There was an evident lack of preparation at all levels,” Galvez-Cloutier said recently in a Science Media Centre of Canada webinar reviewing the events at Lac-Mégantic. “Prevention measures, preparedness and emergency plans need to urgently be updated.”

“I think there was a panic and there was a lack of co-ordination,” she said.

At the time of the incident, firefighters were cooling oil tankers without having subdued the fire, Galvez-Cloutier recounted, adding the emergency response personnel did not know what the composition of the burning oil was.

Had they known, it’s likely they would have responded more appropriately to the fire, she said, using foam suppressants, for example.

“I know that Ultramar brought in, as a last resort, some foam to assist, but this was based on their goodwill, not a pre-planned emergency measure,” she said.

Grassroots groups respond

The increase in oil tanker accidents led a coalition of environmental organizations to create an ‘Oil by Rail Week of Action’ between July 6 and 13.

The coalition includes ForestEthics, Oil Change International, 350.org and the Sierra Club.

On Monday the groups plan to launch a ‘blast zone’ website which will make communities along oil tanker routes searchable by address.

Eddie Scher, spokesperson for ForestEthics, said the website brings together rail industry data and Google maps to make evacuations zones visible.

“It allows you to plug in your address and see where you sit in relation to this Google map blast zone,” Scher told DeSmog by phone.

“And what you find, which isn’t that surprising, is that these trains — mile long trains carrying 3 million gallons of oil — go right through the centre of almost very major city in U.S.”

“Our rail system was designed to carry goods, not carry hazardous materials through city centres,” he said.

Major cities including L.A., Oakland and Chicago have oil trains running through them.

The database, which is searchable for both U.S. and Canadian addresses, is designed to bring information about oil train transport to the public, something Scher says should already be available to the communities along rail transport lines.

“It’s pretty outrageous that we’re the ones to have to do this. We’re happy that emergency responders have this information but everyone should know what’s going on.”

“We’re working on the numbers right now, but it’s easy to say with the information we have that 10 of millions of Americans live in that blast zone,” he said.

“The amount of the populations that is threatened is huge. What we’re really trying to do is to let folks see what is going on.“

Image Credit: Transportation Safety Board via flickr.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A joint task force announced by B.C. and Alberta premiers Christy Clark and Alison Redford in July has handed in a report examining the feasibility of transporting oil by rail, according to the Canadian Press. The report is not yet available to the public.

The task force, whose mandate includes exploring the possibility of transporting crude oil from the oilsands via rail to the coast if proposed pipelines like Enbridge's Northern Gateway are denied, has been called "underhanded" by environmental group ForestEthics.

Ben West, campaign director for ForestEthics, said that the task force was a "backdoor way for industry to bring tankers to the coast without the same sort of public oversight or public process that we've had around the Enbridge pipeline or would have around the Kinder Morgan pipeline."

"Myself and other people were pretty freaked out about what happened there," West said of the recent explosions.

The joint task force was announced as a way for the two provinces to develop recommendations on opening up new export markets for oil, gas and other resources, including oilsands bitumen. Spills, fiscal and economic benefits and First Nations rights were also to be discussed.

The provincial working group was mandated to submit its report to premiers Clark and Redford by December.

"Rail can be considered a viable alternative to pipeline movement based on costs of transport," the terms of reference for the group states. "If pipelines are not developed, rail will step into the void to deliver bitumen to the West Coast."

Enbridge's Northern Gateway pipeline was recently approved by a federal panel, and Kinder Morgan officially submitted its application for the Trans Mountain Expansion project to the National Energy Board in December. Both projects will bring oil to the BC coast.

The provincial task force was led by Steve Carr, deputy minister of natural gas development in B.C. and Grant Sprague, deputy minister of energy in Alberta.

Neither ministry could be reached for comment. CN Rail declined to comment.

Image Credit: BC Gov Photos / Flickr

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