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.

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.

Read At the Limits of the Market: Why Capitalism Won't Solve Climate Change, Part 1.

One answer to the question of why free market capitalism has failed to generate technological solutions to the crisis of climate change is that green innovation simply isn’t as profitable as speculation. In an era when financial markets generate record profits and investment banks are too big to fail, the long work of investment, research and construction of new energy infrastructure simply isn’t attractive to profit-seeking corporations.

Faced with the clear failure of the free market to respond to the approaching dangers of climate change, politicians have reacted by attempting to coax corporations into serving the needs of people as well as the bottom line. This is typically referred to as finding “market-based solutions.” It sounds good at first: we’ll harness the best minds in the private sector to develop new technology, create new jobs and solve climate change in the process.

But all too often the phrase “market-based solutions” works as a kind of coded communication. In effect, it signals to corporations that the government will not take any measures that could interfere with their business model. Rather than impose meaningful restrictions on emissions or the extraction of fossil fuels, market-based solutions focus on changing behavior by creating the right set of incentives.  

But without strong penalties to go along with those incentives—a stick alongside the carrot—market-based solutions simply end up creating profitable new markets without addressing the underlying economic drivers of climate change.

When the Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997, the creation of markets for trading carbon emissions (typically referred to as a cap-and-trade system) was established as the primary means of tackling climate change without endangering profits. The basic idea of carbon markets is simple: establish a cap or limit on the total amount of CO2 that companies can emit. That amount of carbon is then divided up and allocated to different companies through the creation of carbon permits: in order to emit any amount of carbon, each company needs the corresponding permits.[view:in_this_series=block_1]

For those companies that emit less than the allotted amount, carbon permits can be traded or sold for additional income. For those companies that produce carbon emissions over the limit, the need to purchase costly permits should function as a reason to innovate and develop low-carbon production methods.

But carbon emissions trading hasn’t lived up to its promise. The world’s largest market for carbon emissions trading, the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS), is failing. The European system is awash in excessive permits, meaning that the price of emitting carbon is so low that corporations have no incentive to clean up their production methods. At the global level, the United Nations Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is suffering a similar fate.

As Steffen Böhm, director of the Essex Sustainability Institute at the University of Essex contends, “Carbon markets have lost us more than 15 years in the battle against climate change.” A combination of aggressive industry lobbying for additional permits, a lack of transparency and inadequate oversight mechanisms has simply turned carbon markets into yet another profitable arena for speculation, with no measurable effect in terms of reducing emissions.

One of the staunchest critics of the emissions trading approach is NASA climate scientist and activist James Hansen. Hansen has accused carbon markets of failing to rein in emissions and allowing “polluters and Wall Street traders to fleece the public out of billions of dollars.”

Hansen’s critique is more than grousing from the sidelines. Alongside groups such as the Citizens Climate Lobby in Canada, Hansen advocates an alternative approach to reducing emissions called fee and dividend. Although it remains a solution based on the market, fee and dividend takes a different tactic: rather than work to create new avenues for profit, it restricts markets, makes the fossil fuel sector less lucrative, and attempts to direct markets to meet human needs.

Unlike the cap and trade system, which is plagued by an opaque structure and dominated by bankers, industry insiders and technocrats, fee and dividend relies on a simple mechanism. It works by imposing a carbon fee directly at the point in which fossil fuels enter the economy: the port, the wellhead or the mineshaft. The collected fees are then distributed in their entirety to the population in the form of a monthly dividend. Everyone receives the same amount deposited directly into their bank account, regardless of income or assets.

The carbon fee would then increase each year, slowly making reliance on fossil fuels less and less economical, while driving incentive for green innovation. Since the increased cost of fossil fuels would then be passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices, the monthly dividend provides a cushion to compensate for higher heating and transportation costs.

The advantages of this system over cap and trade are clear and significant. It is simple and transparent, requires no new government bureaucracy, and does not create new opportunities for speculation. When coupled with the removal of all fossil fuel subsidies, it aims straight for the heart of the economic motor of climate change: cheap oil, gas and coal.

Crucially, fee and dividend also has a progressive dimension. According to a 2011 report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), the emissions of the top 1% of households are approximately three times the average, or six times greater than those of the bottom 10%. The report also shows that two-thirds of Canadians have average or below-average emission levels. Since every household receives the same size monthly carbon dividend, fee and dividend acts as a progressive income boost for lower-income, lower-emission groups. Plus, it provides an economic incentive for all Canadians to reduce their household emissions.  

By ensuring that the costs of reducing emissions are largely borne by the enormously profitable fossil fuel companies themselves, fee and dividend provides an equitable and effective way forward. With the window for action on reducing emissions rapidly closing, we can’t afford to wait for the market to decide that preventing catastrophic climate change is profitable.    

Art by Will Brown. All Rights Reserved.

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.