“The most transparent lobbying regime in Canada.”

That’s what Attorney General David Eby told British Columbians they were getting when the provincial government announced amendments to lobbying rules last year.

“Big money and political insiders have had too much influence for too long,” Eby said. “These changes are long overdue and build on our continuing work to strengthen B.C.’s democracy for all British Columbians.”

Eby’s comments are part of a long line of promises from the B.C. NDP to clean up politics, eliminate big money donations and ferret out corporate influence — which includes Bill 54, the province’s lobbying amendment act introduced last October.

But in spite of much talk and limited action, the secret lobbying of elected officials remains a common practice in B.C. today, according to Duff Conacher, coordinator of Democracy Watch, an Ottawa not-for-profit focused on making Canadian governments and corporations more accountable.

“Secret, unethical lobbying is very easy to do in B.C. still,” Conacher says. “[The NDP] started with very strong rhetoric, but they didn’t follow through.”

Conacher says all of the recently announced changes — including a strengthened two-year ban on lobbying for politicians or high-level bureaucrats after leaving office — only apply to those who officially register with B.C.’s Office of the Registrar of Lobbyists.

But if you are not being expressly paid to lobby, or do less than 50 hours of in-house lobbying a year, registration isn’t required. 

And if you’re unregistered, your interactions are not reported, documented or scrutinized by government or any public watchdog. In other words, at any moment in B.C., an unknown number of unregistered lobbyists are working to influence elected officials on the sly, and it’s completely legal.

‘It’s a sad joke’: gaping holes in lobbying law

This is not just a B.C. problem.

Conacher is calling for broad changes to how Canadian governments regulate lobbying and political donations, noting that lobbying loopholes are found at the federal, provincial and territorial level across the country.

Over his 26-year career in democracy advocacy, he has observed that governments only take action on closing loopholes in the wake of scandal, and in the case of the NDP, to create the impression that the wild west days of the BC Liberals, who ruled the province from 2001-2015, are over.

But not much has really changed, says Conacher, as he reads aloud over the phone from Section 2 of B.C.’s Lobbyist Registration Act. The province’s lobbying rules do not apply to oral or written submissions made to a public office holder concerning the “enforcement, interpretation or application of any Act or regulation.” Nor do they apply to the “implementation or administration of any program, policy, directive, or guideline” by a public office holder.

“It’s a sad joke,” he says. “That almost [exempts] everything. What else is there? The biggest loopholes that allow for secret lobbying in B.C. are still in the law.”

Why do loopholes continue to exist?

Allowing unregistered lobbying opens the door to situations where hired-gun consultants, who usually have to register, can be hired and paid for “strategic advice” — but can lobby without payment. 

The same goes for board members who are paid but agree to lobby for free.

Unlike the province of Quebec or City of Toronto, B.C. has not closed this loophole.

Lobbyists also aren’t required to register if a public office requests contact “for advice or comment.” 

This is a recipe for corruption, Conacher says, particularly in the case of high-level government officials. Theoretically, a cabinet minister can reach out to a lobbyist and make deals in secret, yet there’s no record of it.

“The Access to Information Act doesn’t apply to minister offices, and the [B.C.] Lobbying Act does not apply to that communication either.”

The federal government eliminated this loophole 16 years ago, but it remains on the books in B.C. The question is, why do so many loopholes persist?

The Ministry of the Attorney General turned down multiple requests for an interview with David Eby, and a spokesman would not directly address questions to clarify the persistence of loopholes for unregistered lobbying.

Conacher has a disturbing explanation for why the NDP has talked tough on cleaning up lobbying, yet failed to go the full distance.

“There’s no other reason to leave the loopholes open, except that government wants secret, unethical lobbying, so they can do secret deals behind closed doors with interests they favour.”  

“And they want that all to be off the record.”

‘Deep state’ lobbying a growing tactic of fossil fuel industry, report finds

Lobbying’s dodgy revolving door

It has been less than 10 years since information about lobbying even became available to the public in B.C. In 2010 the Lobbyists Registration Act, for the first time, required lobbyists to register actual or intended meetings with public officials. 

There is now a publicly accessible, searchable database that provides a window into how government works, including the thousands of lobbying records of former B.C. politicians and turned advocates. 

There are many familiar names. Former lands and agriculture minister Pat Bell successfully lobbied for a company seeking contract work on BC Hydro’s Site C dam and, according to LinkedIn, he currently holds board positions with an energy firm and junior mining company. 

Former cabinet minister and Dawson Creek mayor Blair Lekstrom also lobbied on behalf of a business seeking Site C contracts, and among other things, has represented Chinese coal mining company HD Mining. (He was fined in 2016 for breaking lobbying rules.)

But most revolving door examples involve less familiar, former high-level bureaucrats. 

For example, Karina Brino, former assistant deputy minister for the Ministry of Energy and Mines, left her job in July 2011 and by August was the president and CEO of the Mining Association of B.C., the province’s most influential mining advocacy organization (see one of her op-eds here).

Kirk Miller, after a 25-year career with the Agricultural Land Commission, including about seven as chair/CEO, turned around to lobby his former employer on behalf of landowners seeking to exclude land from the Agricultural Land Reserve.

Lobbying undermines public confidence in government

In 2017 Corporate Mapping Project researchers looked at registered lobbying in the province, and discovered that 22,000 lobbying “contacts” were made between public officials and the fossil fuel industry alone between 2010 and 2016. 

They concluded that “B.C. stands out in Canada in terms of its weak regulations against corporations influencing public policy.”

Researcher and lead author Nicolas Graham said the findings were “alarming,” but told The Narwhal his research did not include unregistered lobbying.

The report also found “substantial overlap” between the top corporate political donors and the most frequent lobbyists — suggesting the two practices “work in tandem” to ensure companies with ample resources can leverage those resources to gain the ear of politicians.

According to Bennett Jones lawyer Sharon Singh negative public perception of lobbying undermines public confidence in government and casts suspicion on legitimate communications between public officials and stakeholders.

“Lobbying … generally serves an important purpose by allowing stakeholders to communicate their concerns to public officials,” Singh wrote in a 2018 blog post about B.C.’s lobbying changes. 

“However, recent B.C. experience with political donation issues suggests that lobbying still suffers from negative public perception.”

Speaking with The Narwhal, Singh said the most important change brought in by the B.C. NDP has been the monthly reporting requirement. 

In the past, lobbyists have only been required to list who they think they might lobby. Now lobbyists have to report monthly with details about who they specifically talked to. 

The recent changes also address the need to improve lobbyist disclosure — for example, the new rules notably lower the threshold under which an in-house lobbyist has to register from 100 hours down to 50.

But many of the proposed amendments remain stuck in limbo.

Amendments to the B.C. Lobbyist Registration Act proposed by the NDP government in 2018. Although some changes have been made, many of the amendments remain stuck in limbo one year after being introduced.

A spokesperson with the Ministry of the Attorney General told The Narwhal a majority of the lobbying changes are not yet in force and provided no specifics about when they will be in place. 

He said implementation will be announced via future updates to the Office of the Registrar of Lobbyists. (No such updates have been posted between August-mid and November 2019.)

‘Funneling’ and buying government access

Although B.C. banned corporate and union donations, rules still allow for individual political donations of $1225.17 (B.C. actually increased this amount from $1,200 in 2018).

Conacher told The Narwhal that everywhere in Canada where a personal donation limit persists of $1,000 or more persists there has been suspected or confirmed illegal “funneling.”  

The funneling of personal political donations can work like this: a large company sends one of its executives to the door of a political party with 3,400 separate personal cheques (say $100 each) for each of its employees, telling the party that he is simply facilitating the delivery of personal donations. The party pockets the $34,000. (In reality, the company paid the donation).

In a similar way, SNC Lavalin illegally funneled almost $118,000 to the federal Liberal and Conservative parties, riding associations and candidates through its executives and employees from 2004 to 2011. 

Elections Quebec recently performed an audit that found almost $13 million in likely illegally funneled donations between 2006 and 2011. 

Democracy Watch is calling on Elections B.C. to do a similar audit of donations, looking for patterns that suggest multiple personal donations are connected to a company or other entity. 

Dermod Travis, executive director of Victoria-based democracy advocacy group IntegrityBC, suspects funneling is occurring in British Columbia today. It should be mandatory, he says, to include details about your employer when any personal political donation is made, which would make it much easier to detect funneling.

Elections B.C. director of communications Andrew Watson told The Narwhal they have not identified any cases of “indirect political contributions,” nor have any been brought to their attention to date. 

But he confirmed an audit is imminent. 

“Since the law changed in 2017, we have not audited the accounts of registered political parties. We plan on doing so before the next provincial election.” 

Fixing the system: onus on governments, not lobbyists

The answer to closing lobbying loopholes, according to Democracy Watch, is to reverse the onus on who has to register when lobbying takes place.

Conacher is calling for the creation of a database that records every time a government office is contacted by a person, company or entity trying to lobby. The result would be a comprehensive, searchable database of all government influencers, from an angry local constituent to a lobbyist representing a large corporation.

Database technology is now easily capable of managing a task this big, Conacher says, and government ministries and MP offices already extensively track and record when letters and contacts are received.

Travis mostly concurs.

He says B.C. should exclude normal constituent contacts with MLAs from such a database (for privacy purposes), and lobbyists and the public officials should both have to report any lobbying contact, making it easier to police and cross-check interactions.

With British Columbians waiting on the promise of the most transparent lobbying regime in the country, it remains to be seen if the province will follow through.

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A new report from the Corporate Mapping Project documents the reach of the fossil fuel industry when it comes to lobbying the federal government, raising red flags about what it calls a “troubling shift in lobbying patterns.” 

The report’s findings suggest that industry lobbyists are increasingly focusing on developing closer, long-term relationships with federal bureaucrats rather than elected officials, especially since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took office in 2015.

The report tracked fossil-fuel-industry lobbying over seven years, from 2011 to 2018 — finding that the fossil fuel industry vastly outnumbered other resource sectors, including the forestry and renewable energy industries — and analyzed how lobbying activities changed with prime ministers.

The result, the report found, is lobbying that’s increasingly focused on “deep state” connections, rather than elected officials, meaning the power of the fossil fuel industry lasts far beyond a federal election, regardless of voter appetite for climate action.

What that means, according to Nicolas Graham, a sociologist at the University of Victoria and lead author on the report, is there’s evidence of a sort of “elite policy network,” of long-lasting connections between high-powered and well-connected lobbyists and bureaucrats, “one that outlasts election cycles and develops over time.”

Proponents of the fossil fuel industry, like Alberta premier Jason Kenney, have long made a point of accusing environmental groups of being behind a “campaign of lies and defamation” against the province’s energy industry. 

When it comes to lobbying, the report found that the fossil fuel industry reported far more lobbying of the federal government than did environmental non-governmental organizations —  five times more.

“This idea that there’s a really, really well funded — disproportionately funded — environmental campaign defies the facts of a [fossil fuel] industry that is extremely well funded and very active politically,” Graham told The Narwhal.

Top fossil fuel lobbying organizations. Source: Corporate Mapping Project

‘Co-writing of policy’

Elected officials were the most-lobbied group when Prime Minister Stephen Harper was in office, according to the report. That started to change in 2015, when Justin Trudeau was elected prime minister. Then, the focus of fossil-fuel lobbyists shifted — to bureaucrats.

The report, “Big Oil’s Political Reach: Mapping fossil fuel lobbying from Harper to Trudeau,”  dubs this a shift to “deep state” lobbying, “whereby key government institutions and actors become integrated with private firms and interest groups that together co-produce regulation and policy.”

“It becomes this kind of a fusion of private interest and public bodies.” — Nicolas Graham

The result, Graham said, could suggest a kind of “co-governance and co-writing of policy,” in which industry groups take on an increasingly important role in influencing policy.

“It becomes this kind of a fusion of private interest and public bodies,” he added

Elected officials, Graham said, could be “seen as potentially not as amenable to influence from the oil and gas sector.” A strategic approach for the industry could be to integrate more deeply in government, lobbying bureaucrats rather than elected officials.

The report finds a network of well-connected senior public servants and mid-level staff who are in frequent contact with industry lobbyists.

Among the top 10 senior federal bureaucrats identified by the Corporate Mapping Project — each of whom remained in their positions after the 2015 election — the number of annual contacts with fossil fuel industry lobbyists increased from an average of around 145 contacts per year under the Harper government, to approximately 229 per year under the Trudeau government — nearly one contact per work day.

Pierre Gratton, president and CEO of the Mining Association of Canada, doesn’t think that’s newsworthy. “Anyone who does government relations knows that you work at all levels,” Gratton told The Narwhal.

“If you’re leaving it to parliament, you’re going to be disappointed in your outcome. Because the public service is the body that generates the ideas that cabinet and ultimately parliament end up deliberating upon,” he added.

“They’re often looking to us for ideas of how certain policies can work effectively.”

Gratton is also not surprised that there would be an increase in lobbying under the Liberals. “There would be a very simple explanation for that, I think — the Liberals’ approach to public policy was far more open than it was under Harper,” he said.

“Under the Liberals, I think probably everybody increased their amount of lobbying, particularly with public service. But that’s because the Liberals fundamentally changed how public policy was developed.” The Liberals, Gratton said, took public officials “off the leash” and made them more accessible to all groups.

But Graham is concerned that increased lobbying of non-elected officials could mean that lobbying efforts can far outlast election cycles and that electing new politicians may not be enough for voters to cast aside deep relationships between industry and government — something the report calls “the close coupling of federal policy to the needs of extractive corporations.”

“For people who voted in the federal election for some kind of increased action on climate change, I think it would be potentially eye-opening to think about the way policy is formed,” Graham said.

Six lobbying contacts per day

The reports finds the fossil fuel industry reported 11,452 lobbying contacts with government officials over a seven-year period — more than six contacts per work day.

A full quarter of those stem from two major industry associations: the Mining Association of Canada (MAC) — which represents a variety of mining interests, including four companies with interests in Alberta’s oilsands — and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP). 

CAPP declined The Narwhal’s request for an interview about its lobbying activity, but sent a statement by email. 

“It is not surprising CAPP is among the most active lobbyists in our sector,” Jay Averill, a spokesperson for CAPP, wrote in an email. “In effect, we are the main representative for Canada’s oil and natural gas industry.”

Federal institutions lobbied between 2011 and 2018. Source: Corporate Mapping Project

“It is our job to work with local, provincial and federal governments to find the best way to encourage investment in our industry while upholding the high social and environmental standards Canadians expect,” he added, noting that the industry contributes $8 billion in annual revenues to all levels of government.

“Our oil and natural gas industry benefits all Canadians and CAPP will continue to work with the federal government on making those benefits even greater.”

Gratton, of the Mining Association of Canada, rejects the notion that his organization represents the interests of the fossil fuel industry, saying his group advocates on a narrower subset of issues and was the first industry association that came out in favour of a carbon price.

Gratton told The Narwhal that one of the reasons his organization is top of the list in lobbying activities could be because it is diligent in reporting. 

“We report everything. We’re very careful about living up to the intent and spirit of the act,” he said.

 “I have trouble believing we are much more active than other industry groups active in Ottawa,” he added, pointing to a “grey area” in when meetings with public officials are reported. 

The Corporate Mapping Project report points to numerous flaws in Canada’s lobbying rules — vague information about what was actually discussed at lobbying meetings, lack of names of lobbyists present, imprecise dates, no disclosure of fees paid to lobbyists.

“There are fairly straightforward ways transparency could be improved,” Graham said.

Lobbying windows

Lobbying efforts increase in what are known as “lobbying windows,” according to the report.

One such lobbying window was during debate leading up to changes to Canada’s environmental assessment process under the Harper government. The report found that — of the years included in the report’s analysis — the year between November 2011 and November 2012 was the highest recorded year of lobbying from the sector.

The report’s findings on lobbying windows are in line with a previous investigation by The Narwhal, which found that 80 per cent of Senate lobbying over Bill C-69 — the act to reform Canada’s environmental assessment process, that passed in June —  stemmed from industry and related groups, primarily from the oil and gas industry.

The Corporate Mapping Project report found just 10 fossil fuel industry lobbying contacts with the Senate in 2016-2017. The Narwhal found the oil and gas industry met with individual Senate members 224 times over a 16-month period beginning when Bill-C-69 was first introduced in February 2018.

“In 2018–19 big carbon saw an opportunity to block mild reforms to environmental assessment and its Senate lobbying went into overdrive,” the report notes.

As The Narwhal reported in June, CAPP had described, in its lobbyist registration, one of the topics it planned to address a “grassroots lobbying campaign to ask Senators to make sure [Bill C-69] does not pass as it stands today.”

Leaders of major energy companies have acknowledged increasing their lobbying efforts during times like these in the past.

Speaking to CBC in June, Cenovus CEO Alex Pourbaix noted that the industry had ramped up activities to “an almost unprecedented effort with government,” in order to come up with what he had hoped would be “a workable bill.”

Not all industry groups opposed the bill. The Mining Association of Canada has supported Bill C-69 since it was introduced, telling CBC in June that it would provide more certainty and was an improvement over existing legislation. 

Public interest?

Graham is quick to point out that not all lobbying is negative, and that it can play a legitimate role in advancing the public interest. What’s missing, he said, is an equalization of influence, or “equalizing access” to politicians and bureaucrats.

The report documents a “core of a small world of leading industry associations and targeted offices and individuals within government that are in regular contact with each other” — just 20 organizations accounted for 88 per cent of the total lobbying contacts by the fossil fuel industry, according to the report.

“Policies that would proactively support more equal access to political influence are needed to ensure industry is not over-represented when shaping policy,” the report notes.

Gratton of the Mining Association isn’t concerned about the state of lobbying activities in Canada, saying critics may be presenting “a sensationalized view that’s really not really a truly representative accounting of how things function.”

“Canada’s [lobbying] is very different from lobbying in the United States,” he said. “It doesn’t happen in darkened corridors.”

Gratton views Canada’s lobbying rules as robust, and says he supports multi-stakeholder engagement. “I’ll be honest, in this age of sort of populism and Trumpism, I worry that that unique Canadian way of doing things is under threat,” he told The Narwhal.

“I would hate to see a day when in the public policy is developed differently than it has been traditionally in Canada,” he said. “It’s a better way of doing things that’s better for the country.”

But Graham told The Narwhal that he’s concerned about the ways in which corporations can influence public policy in Canada.

“The economic power of industry ends up reaching into political society,” he said.

And without equal access to influence political decisions, the report warns that meaningful action to reduce fossil fuel consumption may be that much more difficult.

“In this time of climate crisis, transitioning away from fossil fuels in a rapid, democratic and socially just manner is essential,” William Carroll, a co-author of the study said in a press release. 

“If we do not acknowledge and address the influence that the fossil fuel industry holds over government policy, we will not be able to take the steps necessary to adequately address the crisis with the urgency it requires.”

*Updated at 2:08 p.m. on Nov. 5, 2019, to clarify that in 2016/2017, there were 10 fossil fuel industry lobbying contacts with the Senate, not in total.

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.

An investigation by The Narwhal reveals that industry and related groups, primarily from the oil and gas industry, are responsible for more than 80 per cent of Senate lobbying on Bill C-69, Canada’s proposed new environmental assessment law.

In contrast, just 13 per cent of Senate and Senate staff lobbying was conducted by environmental groups and four per cent was carried out by one First Nation.

Twenty-nine groups representing industry, business and related associations registered to lobby the government specifically about Bill C-69, which introduces new rules for reviewing major projects like mines and pipelines following the gutting of environmental assessment legislation by the former Stephen Harper government.

Of these groups, 21 went on to have 224 meetings with individual Senate members over a 16-month period beginning when Bill-C-69 was first introduced in February 2018. (To read more about how The Narwhal conducted this analysis, read our methods at the end of the article).

The unelected Senate has become a potential show-stopper for Bill C-69, which would make updates to Canada’s environmental assessment laws promised by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during the last election campaign. The bill was supported by four out of five political parties in the House of Commons.

Normally the Senate would readily approve legislation backed by a majority of MPs. But last Thursday, in a rare move that tests the limits of its power, the Senate passed Bill C-69 with 187 sweeping amendments that experts say would leave Canada with weaker environmental assessment laws than those introduced by the Harper government.

Breakdown of meetings linked to lobbying on Bill C-69 that targeted the Senate. These meetings took place between February 8, 2018 — the date Bill C-69 was introduced — and early June 2019. The Narwhal is looking at meetings arranged with lobbyists that specifically named Bill C-69 in their registrations.

Many of the Senate’s amendments mirrored requests, some word for word, from oil companies and related associations such as the industry lobby group Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP).

CAPP, which has issued press releases and written op-eds condemning the original Bill C-69, has lobbied 36 senators since Bill C-69 was introduced, some of them on multiple occasions, according to The Narwhal’s findings.

Only three environmental groups specifically listed Bill C-69 as a target for their government lobbying — the Quebec Centre for Environmental Law, West Coast Environmental Law and the Pembina Institute, a Canadian non-profit think tank focused on energy issues.

Those three groups had a total of 36 meetings over the 16-month period beginning when Bill-C-69 was first introduced by federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna in February 2018.

Foreign ownership of Canada’s oil industry

Kevin Taft, a former Alberta MLA and former leader of Alberta’s Liberal Party, said he’s not at all surprised that the oil industry has “massively outspent and out manoeuvred and out lobbied everybody else” on Bill C-69 — and Bill C-48, which would formalize a 30-year-old moratorium on large oil tanker traffic off B.C.’s north coast.

Taft said he’s struck by what he called an“Orwellian twist” and irony that Alberta Premier Jason Kenney faults “foreign-funded” environmental groups for influencing bills C-69 and C-48 when the oil industry has played a far larger role in lobbying. The oil industry, Taft said, is largely foreign-funded even though it’s based in Calgary.

Last Friday, when Kenney announced his “energy war room,” he repeated a now-familiar refrain from his campaign that environmental groups are behind a “campaign of lies and defamation” against the province’s energy industry.

Kenney, flanked by oil and gas industry representatives including the CEO of CAPP, Tim McMillan, told reporters that the “tar sands campaign” launched by environmental groups “helped to write two devastating federal bills — C-48, the ban on Alberta oil exports off our northern coast, and Bill C-69, what we call the No More Pipelines Law.”

Taft pointed out that Imperial Oil is owned by Texas-based Exxon Mobil Corp., while Canadian Natural Resources Limited trades largely on foreign stock exchanges.

China is also heavily invested in Canada’s oil industry. Calgary’s Nexen Energy is now owned by China National Offshore Oil Corporation’s (CNOOC) international division. And Chinese-owned Sinopec Oilsands Partnership — the biggest oil company in the world ranked by revenue — owns nine per cent of Syncrude, while CNOOC acquired seven per cent of Syncrude through its acquisition of Nexen.

Then there’s Husky Energy Inc., one of the largest oil companies operating in Alberta. The majority stake in Husky is controlled by the family of Hong Kong’s richest man, recently retired billionaire Li Ka-shing, who holds approximately 70 per cent of the company’s shares.

Oil industry spends ‘millions’ a year on lobbying and PR campaigns

Laurie Adkin, a political science professor at the University of Alberta, said to imply that the oil and gas industry is the victim of propaganda and the environmentalists have all the power is “an inversion of what we know factually.”

“The reality is that the oil and gas industry has huge resources to lobby and finance public information campaigns, advertising … departments dedicated to engaging in government relations, digital communications, preparation of submissions for inquiries and consultations of various kinds,” she told The Narwhal.

“We know that they spend millions of dollars a year on this.”

Adkin noted that environmental lawyers say the government’s original version of Bill C-69 is weak, pointing out that it doesn’t go far enough to reverse the Harper government’s deregulation and protect the health of Canadians and biodiversity, or to address the climate change effects of Canada’s extractive industries.

The oil and gas industry views Bill C-69 and Bill C-48 as “obstructions” to building pipelines and expanding the oilsands, Adkin said. “So they are investing a lot in defeating them and modifying them.”

Oil industry has a ‘grip on the throat of democracy’

“It’s not a coincidence that five members of Jason Kenney’s cabinet, including the energy minister, are from the oil industry,” said Taft, author of the book Oil’s Deep State, which examines why democratic governments have failed to take serious steps to reduce carbon emissions despite compelling evidence of the growing threat posed by the climate crisis.

In addition to Sonya Savage, Alberta’s energy minister, at least four other ministers in Kenney’s cabinet list extensive oil and gas experience in their government biographies.

Taft said the oil industry has “got a grip around the throat of democracy in Canada” and that he believes that anybody who thinks the Alberta government is looking after the best interests of Albertans is mistaken.

“The Alberta government is looking after the best interests of the oil industry and that’s because the oil industry has such a tight grip on most of the democratic institutions in this province. And they are working hard and deliberately to tighten that grip nationally through the Conservative party, for example, whose senators are bringing forward legislative amendments written word for word by the industry.”

“Those should be ringing loud alarm bells for every Canadian,” Taft said. “When we have a rich, powerful, foreign-controlled industry drafting our legislation for us we have a real problem with democracy in Canada.”

Industry lobbies government 16 times more than environmentalists

At press time, the full House of Commons was poised to debate a motion to accept about one-third of the Senate’s amendments and reject about two-thirds. Once the amended bill is approved by a majority of MPs it will return to the Senate for consideration, likely next week.

The Narwhal’s investigation reveals industry and related groups had far more access to politicians than environmental groups did, even before the bill reached the Senate.

In addition to tallying lobbying of the Senate, The Narwhal also looked at the total number of lobbying meetings with all government officials reported by groups registered to lobby on Bill C-69. This includes senators, members of parliament, the prime minister’s office and all other public office holders. These reports span a 12-month period.

Because the communications reports that document meetings do not specify the content of the lobbying effort, we couldn’t verify that each of these meetings directly included Bill C-69, though each group had included the bill in their lobbyist registration.

The Narwhal’s analysis found that industry and associated groups registered to lobby on Bill C-69 had 945 meetings with government officials in a 12-month period.

Breakdown of meetings linked to lobbying on Bill C-69 that targeted all government officials, including the Senate, members of parliament and other public office holders. These meetings took place over a 12-month period. The Narwhal is looking at meetings arranged with lobbyists that specifically named Bill C-69 in their registrations.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) alone reported more than 100 meetings during this time period.

In its lobbyist registration, CAPP listed — among a myriad of other topics — what it described as a “grassroots lobbying campaign to ask Senators to make sure [Bill C-69] does not pass as it stands today” as one of its lobbying activities.

Elisabeth Besson, a spokesperson for CAPP, declined to answer specific questions but told The Narwhal by email “CAPP seeks to work collaboratively with governments to meet a common goal — protect the environment, responsibly grow oil and natural gas production and strengthen the economy. We appreciate opportunities to submit comments or participate in working groups to provide our expertise, along with other key stakeholders, on a given topic.”

Taft said “for practical purposes” oil companies have unlimited resources for lobbying.

“They count their dollars by the billions whereas environmental groups count them by the thousands,” he said. “It’s a complete and utter mismatch.”

“Organizations and corporations lobby because it’s effective,” Taft said, adding that lobbying is “only one small component” of the oil industry’s broader strategy.

“It’s a strategy that, in addition to lobbying, includes advertising, legal threats, massive political donations … [and] overt political organization,” Taft told The Narwhal.

By comparison, environmental groups registered to lobby on C-69 held 58 meetings with government officials — about six per cent of the lobbying done by industry-related groups.

Indigenous groups registered to lobby on C-69 filed a total of seven communications in the same period.

Not all industry groups oppose the bill. The Mining Association of Canada has supported Bill C-69 since it was introduced, saying it would provide more certainty and is an improvement over existing legislation. The association’s CEO, Pierre Gratton, told CBC that metal and minerals mines account for more than half of current environmental assessments.

Industry is ‘in the driver’s seat’

David Hughes, an earth scientist who has studied the energy resources of Canada and the U.S. for more than four decades, said The Narwhal’s analysis clearly show “industry is in the driver’s seat.”

“The industry’s been incredibly successful in ramping up production, which is why we have a pipeline bottleneck,” Hughes said in an interview.

“If the environmental groups are lobbying to reduce production and leave it in the ground they’re incredibly unsuccessful.”

Oilsands production increased 376 per cent from 2000 to 2018, according to Hughes, who spent 32 years with the Geological Survey of Canada as a scientist and research manager.

Oil production in the rest of Canada increased 45 per cent over the same time period, he said, while conventional oil production in Alberta dropped by 34 per cent.

Canada’s net oil exports have increased by 515 per cent since 2000, Hughes pointed out, adding that “environmental groups have been very ineffective.”

As overall oil production has climbed, royalties to government have plummeted — by almost 60 per cent, or $9.5 billion, from 2000 to 2017, according to Hughes.

‘Very big disproportionality’

University of Victoria sociologist Bill Carroll, whose research focuses on the relationships between corporate power, fossil fuel capitalism and the climate crisis, said The Narwhal’s findings are consistent with patterns traced by the Corporate Mapping Project he co-directs.

“What Jason Kenney says is not only untrue in terms of the specific details of Bill C-69 but it doesn’t fit the actual reality of lobbying in a larger time frame,” Carroll said in an interview.

Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the mapping project — a partnership of several universities and civil-society organizations — examined fossil fuel sector lobbying of federal agencies and public office holders from early 2011 to early 2018.

That research showed that 260 fossil fuel companies and carbon-sector industry associations, such as the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, lobbied the federal government over that time period, registering more than 11,000 distinct lobbying contacts.

Those lobbying contacts were concentrated among a small number of those 260 organizations, with the top 20 organizations accounting for 88 per cent of all lobbying, Carroll said. Those included CAPP, Enbridge, Suncor and TransCanada Corp (now known as TC Energy).

By comparison, over the same seven-year period, 16 environmental groups were active in lobbying at the federal level, Carroll said. “Their total lobbying contacts amounted to one-fifth of what the fossil fuel sector was doing. So a very big disproportionality there.”

The most active environmental group was the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, with 628 lobbying contacts. Other top environmental lobbyists were Environmental Defence, Pembina, Nature Canada, Ducks Unlimited and the David Suzuki Foundation, Carroll said.

Fossil fuel companies and associations are lobbying in an effort to shape legislation and policy “in ways that maximize their profitability” as part of business strategies, he noted.

“There’s an ongoing strategic concern to shape policy, to in a sense bombard policy makers — including senior civil servants and politicians — with a lot of information in an on-going, really permanent campaign in which the voice of industry is dominant.”

‘Tactical’ lobbying

When a specific piece of legislation like Bill C-69 is introduced, a “lobbying window” opens up and lobbying takes on a more “tactical aspect,” according to Carroll.

Speaking to CBC this week, Cenovus CEO Alex Pourbaix characterized his industry’s involvement with Bill C-69 and subsequent amendments as an “almost unprecedented effort with government.”

Rick Petersen, founder of the group Suits and Boots, penned a strategy for killing Bill C-69 in the Senate. Suits and Boots describes itself as a “grassroots organization” of 3,700 members, founded in April 2018 by a group of investment community colleagues (the ‘suits’) who support the working families of the resource sector (the ‘boots’).

Petersen wrote that only 48 Senate votes were needed to kibosh the bill.

He theorized that the 31 Conservative Senators “will all very likely oppose C-69.” So only an additional 17 votes would be needed from the remaining 64 sitting senators, Petersen wrote on the Suits and Boots website, which published a list of senators people could call to “kill Bill C-69.”

Of the sitting non-Conservative senators, 11 are Liberal, 45 are independent and eight are non-affiliated.

CAPP’s Senate lobbying on Bill C-69 reflected the strategy outlined by Petersen. Of the 37 senators lobbied by CAPP since February 2018, only approximately a fifth were Conservative senators — eight in total, including one senator who retired in August 2018.

The majority of senators CAPP targeted for lobbying — 24 in total — were independents. CAPP also targeted two Liberal senators and two non-affiliated senators.

Suits and Boots is a non-profit organization that lists neither its total funding nor its funding sources, although its website solicits donations from “individual grassroots supporters.” The website says the group received “early support” from corporations that include Canoe Financial and Petersen Capital.

As part of the group’s campaign targeting the Senate, launched last October, Suits and Boots hired an airplane to fly over Parliament Hill trailing a huge banner for all to see.

The message was clear: “Kill Bill C-69.”

*Updated 9:20 a.m. June 14, 2019, to add the word ‘net’ to this sentence: Canada’s net oil exports have increased by 515 per cent since 2000, Hughes pointed out, adding that “environmental groups have been very ineffective.”

Research methods

Wondering how exactly we conducted this analysis?

First we wanted to hone in on the lobbying of the Senate — which was crucial in gutting Bill C-69 — so we tallied the number of lobbying efforts that specifically targeted the Senate.

To do this, The Narwhal scoured the federal lobbyist registry for all registrations that specifically named “C-69,” dating back to February 8, 2018, when federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna introduced the bill.

We then tallied the number of monthly lobby communications reports — communications reports are filed whenever there’s a pre-planned face-to-face meeting, a phone call or any other verbal communication with a member of parliament, senator or other government official — associated with those registrations, including only those that involved the Senate.

We then categorized each lobbyist into one of the categories: industry and related groups, Indigenous groups and environmental groups. A couple of lobbyists, such as Alberta Barley and the Alberta Wheat Commission, were grouped into the “other” category as they appear to be primarily lobbying on agricultural, rather than industry-related, interests.

While we can’t verify the precise content of individual lobby efforts (the communication reports contain only vague subjects, such as “environment” or “energy”), we can identify which groups lobbied Senate members the most extensively in the 16 months after Bill C-69 was introduced. It’s important to note that The Narwhal only searched for lobbyist registrations that specifically named Bill C-69 — other lobbying activities on Bill C-69 may have taken place without specifically naming the bill.

Second, we wanted to get an idea about lobbying of all government officials. To do this, we used the federal lobbying registry’s 12-month tool to compile all communications reports tied to lobbying registrations that specifically named Bill C-69.

We again searched for registrations that specifically named C-69, then tallied communications reports and grouped them using the same categories.

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Alberta Premier Jason Kenney calls Bill-69 the “No More Pipelines Act” and says he’ll take the proposed environmental impact legislation to court if it becomes law.

“This bill does not need a nip and tuck,” Kenney told Canadian senators in May. “It needs major reconstructive surgery or it needs to be put out to pasture.”

True to Kenney’s wishes, the bill — which introduces new rules for reviewing major projects like mines and pipelines following the gutting of environmental assessment legislation by the former Stephen Harper government — received far more than a nip and tuck in the Senate.

Major reconstructive surgery came in the form of 187 amendments approved by the Senate on Thursday evening, following intense lobbying led by the oil and gas industry and an in-person appeal by Kenney. The new premier travelled to Ottawa only days after he was sworn in, telling members of the Senate’s energy committee that Bill C-69 was the “culmination of a full-frontal attack” on Alberta’s economic prosperity.

But the Senate’s surgery is so extreme, with many of its wide-ranging amendments mirroring requests from the oil and gas industry, some verbatim, that environmental law experts say Canada would be better off leaving the Harper-era environmental assessment legislation in place.

“Unless the vast majority of those amendments are rejected, then it’s worse than what we have right now,” University of Calgary law associate professor Martin Olszynski said.

“What’s happened now is just ridiculous,” Olszynski, who specializes in environmental law, told The Narwhal.

“The [Senate] changes are not thought out. . .They’re essentially putting so many holes in the ship that it won’t even hold water.”

Senate amendments are ‘badly drafted’

Bob Gibson, a University of Waterloo professor in the department of environmental and resource studies, examined the fine print of every one of the Senate’s 187 amendments to Bill C-69 and wrote a detailed 20-page analysis.

He recommended that virtually all the amendments be rejected.

“A lot of the amendments are badly drafted,” Gibson said in an interview. “The amendments to me look like a large portion of it is driven by political optics more than substantive consideration.”

“I think a lot of it is fairly profoundly cynical. And I think a lot of it is ill-informed.”

Bill C-69 addresses an election campaign promise made by the Liberals to make environmental assessment credible again. The Harper government virtually dismantled Canada’s environmental assessment process, drastically reducing the number of federal assessments among other major cuts.

Following a report from an expert panel that travelled across the country, hearing from stakeholders in 21 cities, federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna introduced Bill C-69 in February 2018, saying the new legislation would ensure “more timely and predictable project reviews” that would attract investment and development.

The 340-page bill replaces the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency with the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada. The bill also makes changes to the Navigable Waters Act and overhauls the beleaguered National Energy Board, replacing it with a Canadian Energy Regulator.

The new impact assessment agency would review all major projects in the country, assessing not just the environmental impacts but also the social, economic and health impacts, as well as the effects on Indigenous peoples.

The bill establishes timelines for assessments and requires that impacts on Indigenous rights and culture be considered early on in the planning process.

Experts say Bill C-69 is not ‘anti-pipeline’

Both Olszynski and Gibson said Bill C-69 is neither anti-pipeline nor pro-pipeline.

“Since the current federal government bought a pipeline out of devotion to getting resources to market — and/or retaining associated votes — it’s a safe bet that they don’t intend for C-69 to be anti-pipeline,” Gibson said.

Indications are that more pipeline and oil and gas projects would be exempted from environmental review under Bill C-69 than under the existing law, Gibson said.

Olszynski pointed out that the proposed Impact Assessment Act, like all of its predecessors, is “entirely procedural in nature. It sets out a decision-making process only.”

The amendments come as members of the Red Chamber test their power to influence laws following reforms introduced by the Trudeau government that are intended to make the unelected Senate less partisan. A majority of senators now sit as independents.

The amended Bill C-69 will go to Parliament for consideration next week, but if MPs make any changes to the Senate amendments the bill will bounce back to the Senate for approval.

Typically the Senate would approve a bill at that point, but legislative deadlock is possible and Bill C-69 will die on the order paper if it has not been passed into law before the current legislative session ends (scheduled for June 21).

Many amendments are at the request of the oil and gas industry

Olszynski described the majority of the Senate committee amendments as akin to putting Bill C-69 through “some kind of incoherence-generating machine.”

“They’ve just essentially attacked various aspects, various provisions,” he said. “Much of it is at the request of the oil and gas industry, [and] some of it is from the independent senator’s group who I think failed to appreciate just how complex and interconnected all these different parts are.”

As one example, Olszynski pointed to a Senate amendment that would require the new assessment agency to respect something called a  “principle of proportionality” — involving the time and money proponents spend on studies during an assessment.

Olszynski said he is not aware of the existence of a “principle of proportionality” in environmental assessment regimes anywhere in the world.

He said it’s hard to imagine a “more uncertain” provision given that critics of Bill C-69 say they want more certainty in environmental legislation.

The idea of proportionality is bound to generate conflict, litigation and delay, Olszynski said.

“Proponents will balk at every additional study or information request, claiming disproportionality,” he wrote in an analysis of Bill C-69. “If adopted, this provision would become a major pinch point in every contentious assessment.”

Senate amendments downplay climate change considerations

The Senate amendments would also require that a project’s impacts on the environment and climate change be considered on a global level.

Before any amendments, Bill C-69 would require decision-makers to consider the extent to which a project would hinder or contribute to meeting Canada’s climate change commitments.

But projects do not have to help Canada meet those commitments. Nor would major projects be rejected if they make it more difficult for Canada to meet commitments, according to the original bill.

“When you look at even the most massive greenhouse gas emissions emitting plants they are all insignificant on a global level,” Olszynski said.

He pointed to Shell Canada’s Jackpine oilsands mine north of Fort McMurray as an example of the argument that carbon emissions from a major Canadian project should be discounted in light of global emissions. Shell argued that greenhouse gas emissions associated with the expansion — roughly the equivalent of putting 281,000 new cars on the road a year — were negligible because they only represented .5 per cent of Alberta’s total emissions.

Gibson said the “great elephant in the room” with the Senate amendments is climate change, pointing out that the science says we have to be down to net zero greenhouse gas emissions globally by 2050 to avoid catastrophic climate change.

“Understandably, the oil sector, including the pipeline interests, would much rather not have climate mentioned in the assessment law, or to have it delayed and muted by a long-extended and heavily lobbied policy exercise,” Gibson said. “They may get their wish. That is the thrust of some of the Senate amendments.”

“But that won’t delay actual climate change or associated damage and outrage. Nor will it make new bitumen extraction operations and new dilbit [diluted bitumen] pipelines a better bet for investors who can see ahead to stranded assets, or to Albertans who wonder how the Alberta economy will support their children.”

Syncrude operation in Alberta’s oilsands north of Fort McMurray. Photo: Louis Bockner / Sierra Club BC

Oil and gas industry lobbied senators intensively

Shortly after the Senate voted to accept the amendments — as proposed by the Senate committee on energy, the environment and natural resources — Kenney tweeted his approval, saying he was “very pleased.”

In a subsequent statement, Kenney noted that the amendments adopted by the Senate were proposed by the Alberta government, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and the Canadian Energy Pipelines Association.

Lobbying of senators by the oil and gas industry intensified as Senate committees considered Bill C-69 and Bill C-48, which formalizes a decades-old moratorium on large oil tanker traffic off B.C.’s north coast. The Senate approved Bill C-48 on Thursday, after the bill was rejected by the Senate transport committee following ‘exhaustive’ industry lobbying.

From February 9, 2018 — the day after McKenna introduced Bill C-69 — to June 6, 2019, CAPP lobbied senators 29 times on issues pertaining to the environment, according to the federal lobbyist registry. Some of CAPP’s lobbying efforts involved multiple senators at once.

Sixteen individual oil and pipeline companies and groups also lobbied a slew of individual senators from November 2018 to the end of April 2019, reporting a total of 122 lobbying communications with senators, including with more than one senator at a time, according to the registry.

Those companies and groups included Enbridge, Imperial Oil, TransCanada and the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association.

The original Bill C-69 would improve government accountability for final decisions

The Alberta government and the oil and gas industry have also criticized Bill C-69 for allowing political discretion when it comes to making final decisions about large projects.

But Gibson pointed out that Cabinet decision-making is already “veiled from public view.” The impact assessment act is stronger than previous legislation because it sets out specific criteria for making final decisions about major projects, including consideration of the impact on Indigenous peoples, he noted.

The new legislation would compel Cabinet to provide reasons for its decisions and justify them while currently those reasons are “just a black box,” Gibson said.

“Because there’s this broad suite of things you have to look at, and because there have to be reasons set out, there is more control of the political discretion than there is in the current act and there was in the previous 1995 one.”

Harper’s environmental assessment rules ‘did not work to deliver approvals’

Yet another criticism is that Bill C-69 will slow approvals for pipeline and oil and gas projects.

But legislation introduced by the Harper government has not resulted in timely approvals for projects such as the Northern Gateway or Trans Mountain pipelines, Olszynski and Gibson both noted.

Harper’s environmental assessment legislation was broken in the sense that it gave approvals, “but they weren’t credible approvals,” Gibson noted.

“CEAA did not work to deliver approvals and shovels in the ground for major projects. The assessment process from 2012 approved Northern Gateway and approved Trans Mountain. But those approvals were not sustainable. They failed before the courts.”

“One of the objectives of the new legislation was to have more credible process that would lead to decisions that were less likely to fail in the longer haul before the courts.”

Bill C-69 sets timelines for project decisions  — a maximum of 300 days for smaller projects with fewer assessment requirements and 600 days for larger projects, down from the current 730 days.

Bill C-69 would keep Harper-era rule to scrutinize only Canada’s largest projects

Olszynski calls the unamended bill a “marginal” improvement over existing legislation. One of his main concerns is that Bill C-69 does not restore the pre-Harper era rules about which projects merit federal environmental assessment because it applies only to major projects.

Before 2012, about 3,000 environmental assessments a year were conducted at the federal level, ranging from screenings to far more intensive panel reviews.

“We’ve just had this massive deregulation on the landscape,” Olszynski said.

“You’ve essentially put a black box over 98 per cent of the activity that you used to know about. That’s what we lost. You’ve lost that understanding. . . Post 2012, the federal government only knows about the biggest projects.”

Olszynksi said while individual large projects are important “it’s the cumulative effect of all those smaller projects that are as important, if not more important, if you’re really interested in managing landscapes and managing ecosystems.”

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The Canadian Energy Pipeline Association (CEPA) plans to lobby the B.C. government on a slew of issues ranging from Indigenous rights and LNG to recovery plans for endangered caribou, according to a lobbyist registration filed April 24.

Rob Beamish, executive director of the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association foundation and in-house lobbyist, intends to meet with Premier John Horgan, Energy Minister Michelle Mungall and Scott Fraser, minister of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation, among other elected officials.

In its registration, the association indicates lobbying activities will include the “Southern Mountain Caribou Protection Strategy.”

Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, whose members include Enbridge Pipelines Inc., TransCanada Pipelines Ltd. and Trans Mountain Corporation, operates 119,000 kilometres of pipeline in Canada.

The association further states it intends to arrange meetings with Environment Minister George Heyman and Doug Donaldson, minister of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations, to discuss issues and policies related to pipeline development and the environment, including plans to protect mountain and boreal caribou.

The lobbying registration provides no further details.

The pipeline association, when contacted by The Narwhal, said no one was available to comment.

Two B.C. caribou herds declared extinct in 2019

In March, the B.C. government released two draft agreements aimed at protecting highly endangered southern mountain caribou.

Almost 30 of B.C.’s 52 surviving caribou herds are at risk of local extinction, and a dozen of those herds now have fewer than 25 animals. Two herds in the Kootenay region were declared locally extinct early this year.

The proposed caribou agreements have spawned misinformation and a racist backlash in northern B.C.

The on-going controversy appears to have been a contributing factor to Horgan’s statement last week that legislation to protect the province’s 1,800 species at-risk is no longer on the table for 2020, as the government had promised.

“There’s no significant species at risk legislation on the docket for the foreseeable future here in B.C.,” Horgan told reporters.

Headquartered in Calgary, CEPA members move 97 per cent of Canada’s daily crude oil and natural gas from producing regions to markets throughout North America.

They also operate approximately 14,000 kilometres of pipelines in the U.S., moving about 1.2 billion barrels of liquid petroleum products and 5.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas each year in both countries.

On the subject of Aboriginal affairs, Beamish intends to engage in discussions with Fraser and his deputy minister Doug Caul on a variety of topics, including job skills and training initiatives, Indigenous consultation processes and the implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

B.C. has committed to upholding the UN declaration, which states that resource projects must have the “free, prior and informed consent” of Indigenous peoples.

On the energy file, the pipeline association intends to lobby Horgan and his staff and Mungall and her staff, as well as the Oil and Gas Commission, “to discuss pipeline issues in B.C.”

According to the lobbyist registration, the group will update ministers and their staff on pipeline industry initiatives that include land-based and marine spill responses, methane emissions regulations, revitalization of the provincial Environmental Assessment Act, the LNG value chain, and market access and regulatory reform issues.

The Canadian Energy Pipeline Association foundation includes both pipeline operators and various companies in the supply chain, including engineers, contractors, manufacturers, and legal, land and environmental service companies.

According to its website, the foundation aims to improve pipeline safety, environmental protection and industry performance.

The pipeline association has two additional active lobbyist registrations in B.C. — both for lobbyists with the national public relations firm Global Public Affairs.

Global offers “full integrated public affairs campaigns” for organizations “looking to persuade people and governments to create the support they need for a winning outcome.”

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Sharks, sea turtles, corals, wolffish — the 1,200 kilometre Laurentian Channel off the southwest coast of Newfoundland is home to tremendous biodiversity.

And that’s the reason it’s set to become Canada’s newest Marine Protected Area, a designation designed to conserve and protect vulnerable species and ecosystems.

There’s just one catch: draft regulations for the proposed 11,619 square-kilometre protected area allow oil and gas exploration and drilling for much of the year. In addition, the government has reduced the size of the protected area by more than one-third from what was originally planned.

Documents obtained by The Narwhal paint a picture of a disturbingly close relationship between the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) and provides clues of how a “marine protected area” ended up allowing offshore oil drilling.

Canada is in a hurry to classify more marine areas as “protected” to meet an international target to protect 10 per cent of its oceans by  2020. Whether an area that allows offshore drilling will even qualify as protected is the subject of heated international debate.

ICYMI: Is Canada Fudging the Numbers on its Marine Protection Progress?

But “high confidence estimates” of up to 257 million barrels of oil and four trillion cubic feet of natural gas put the Laurentian Channel in the crosshairs of conservation and resource extraction.

The documents — obtained by The Narwhal via access to information legislation — reveal that lobbying meetings took place between government and industry without being recorded properly in the federal registry and that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans provided the oil industry lobby group with an advance copy of a presentation.

CAPP received advanced copy of DFO presentation

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans conducted more than 30 consultations since mid-2014, when a proposed regulatory framework for the the Laurentian Channel was first distributed.

Stakeholders included the fishing industry, oil and gas players, the Shipping Federation of Canada, environmental organizations, academics, Indigenous groups and various governments. The last consultation of this kind occured on October 28, 2016, with the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Committee on Oceans Management.

CAPP is listed as only having two consultations with DFO as part of this process: once on May 19, 2016, and another on Oct. 20, 2016.

But on the morning of the second meeting, Stephen Snow — DFO’s manager of oceans for Newfoundland and Labrador — sent an intriguing e-mail to Jennifer Matthews, a policy analyst at CAPP.

Both parties indicated that a call occured on Oct. 19 between Snow and CAPP, with the DFO manager beginning his Oct. 20 e-mail as “a follow-up from our discussion yesterday.” Then, Snow explained that he was attaching a draft presentation about marine conservation targets that he would be presenting that afternoon.

“As we have now concluded consultations with all stakeholders, we have not been giving out the presentation as it contains sensitive information from a DFO perspective that needs to be accompanied with the ‘Presenter,’ ” Snow wrote.  Following that, he specifically requested that CAPP “not share or distribute the power point and delete it as we agreed.”

Excerpt from documents released to The Narwhal via Freedom of Information Legislation. The e-mail exchange shows Stephen Snow, DFO’s manager of oceans for Newfoundland and Labrador, requesting CAPP review, then delete, a presentation regarding marine conservation targets.

This communication raises some big questions, according to Gretchen Fitzgerald,  director of Sierra Club Canada’s Atlantic region chapter.

“It seems like there’s some advanced notice and even some discussions that are happening alluded to in the e-mail that would make you think there’s a little bit too much collaboration going on,” Fitzgerald told The Narwhal.

“It’s just worrying when you see people getting documents in advance of what’s supposed to be a public multi-stakeholder consultation, and being given more opportunity to prepare and an inside-track on these consultations that are supposed to put everybody on an equal footing.”

Stella Ruddock, communications officer for DFO, said in an interview with The Narhwhal that the presentation was sent out early as CAPP had employees in Halifax as well as on the ground in Newfoundland, where the meeting was held, and that it was an attempt to “try to speed up the process of getting the meeting going on time.”

She said that DFO requested that CAPP not share the presentation as “there were maps in the presentation that DFO felt might be misconstrued, I guess, if they weren’t accompanied by the presenter. They felt that if it got out, if it was circulated without the presenter, it might be misunderstood.”

Ruddock couldn’t comment on which specific maps were considered sensitive, or if it’s standard practice for DFO to send out a draft presentation to stakeholders prior to a consultation.

10 CAPP members meet with DFO days after draft regs published

On June 27, 2017 — only three days after the draft regulations for the marine protected area were published in the Canada Gazette — CAPP and at least six other industry heavyweights met with DFO for 45 minutes.

That list included senior representatives from BP, Shell Canada, ExxonMobil, Nexen, Suncor and Statoil. However, e-mails from both CAPP and DFO made reference to “10 CAPP members,” suggesting more may have been present in the room.

Only CAPP and ExxonMobil actually registered the communication in the federal lobbying registry.

ICYMI: BP Wants to Drill Underwater Wells Twice the Depth of Deepwater Horizon in Canada

All companies should have registered the meeting, regardless of it being organized by CAPP, said Duff Conacher, founder of Democracy Watch.

“My opinion is that the companies violated the Lobbying Act by failing to register the meeting in the monthly communications registry,” Conacher said.

BP wasn’t even registered to lobby the federal government (and hadn’t been since 2014).

DFO wanted voluntary commitment not to drill in conservation area

A scenario note prepared for DFO’s senior assistant deputy minister of ecosystems and fisheries management Kevin Stringer noted that CAPP members “will likely raise questions on the intention of the government to prohibit or limit current or future oil and gas activities in MPAs in general, but more specifically in the proposed Laurentian Channel Oceans Act MPA.”

It also noted that DFO’s main objective for the meeting was to ascertain if CAPP would be willing to “demonstrate its marine stewardship commitment” by supporting a statement that “no calls for bid on leases in the Laurentian Channel will ever be issued in support of the long-term conservation of the area.”

It appears DFO did not meet that goal.

A summary of the meeting e-mailed out on July 10, 2017, stated that “there was some discussion about Laurentian Channel but not in detail or in any conclusive way; there was agreement to have an ongoing dialogue.”

Fitzgerald of Sierra Club said in an interview with The Narwhal that it was “quite startling” to see the number of senior representatives who met with DFO on June 27.

“I actually didn’t realize they were so interested in this piece of marine seascape,” she said. “But I think to them, it’s about their right to all the oceans on the East Coast of Canada. That’s the only reason they would assemble such a cast of characters.”

CAPP’s submission claims no serious impacts on marine mammals

Following the publication of the draft regulations on June, there was a 30-day window for public comment.

On July 21, three days before the window closed, CAPP sent its final comments to DFO. Signed by Paul Barnes — the director of the Atlantic Canada and Arctic regions for the association — the letter outlines CAPP’s argument for why it thinks that seismic and drilling activity in the region wouldn’t be seriously harmful to species and ecosystems.

Specifically, CAPP emphasized there have been no documented marine mammal injuries or deaths as a result of seismic surveys. In addition, it noted that impacts of drilling and production at two large offshore sites in Atlantic Canada have had negligible impacts on sediment and water quality monitoring.

Rodolphe Devillers, geography professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland and lead researcher at the Marine Geomatics Research Lab, reviewed CAPP’s final submission and said in an interview with The Narwhal that the facts presented appear accurate. However, he added the caveat:  “It’s just always a question of what facts they select in their letters and not others.”

For example, it’s true that there haven’t been any documented marine mammal mortalities as a consequence of seismic surveys, as it’s very difficult to relate deaths to specific sources.

It’s also consistent with the conservation objectives listed in the federal government’s draft regulations, with a particular focus on preventing “human-induced mortality.”

But as noted by Devillers, the overarching objective of the MPA is to “conserve biodiversity through the protection of key species and their habitats, ecosystem structure and function, and through scientific research.”

To him, and many other ocean scientists, that overarching objective requires the prevention of a wide range of disturbance and harms, not just deaths — something largely unknown due to a lack of scientific studies in the region.

“We do know as scientists that seismic activities do have a number of impacts, which can be loss of hearing, challenges to feed and communicate … Those affect the primary objective of the MPA.”

Seismic testing ‘serious’ pollutant: scientists

A 2013 report by Dalhousie University biologist Lindy Weilgart concluded that at least 37 marine species have been shown to be impacted by seismic testing, and that airgun noise “must be considered a serious marine environmental pollutant.”

On June 22, 2017 — incidentally, a single day before the government released its draft regulations — an article was published in Nature Ecology & Evolution that concluded seismic surveys can double or triple the death rates of zooplankton within a 1.2 kilometre radius. The authors wrote: “Significant impacts on plankton by anthropogenic sources have enormous implications for ocean ecosystem structure and health.”

Devillers voiced similar concerns about CAPP’s positioning on potential contamination.

In the final submission, CAPP said that no drill waste or petrogenic hydrocarbons have ever been detected “outside the 500 metre safety zone during drilling or operations phases” of nearby offshore projects. But Devillers noted that “even if it’s within 100 metres, it’s an impact on the ecosystem.”

“Sometimes things go wrong,” he said. “How willing are we to accept that things can go wrong? Even if it’s one chance in 50 years or something, that’s not acceptable. And they cannot guarantee that this will not happen.”

A simple fix could set clear standard for marine protected areas

A simple solution to all of this would be to amend the Oceans Act to prohibit all extractive activities in Marine Protected Areas, said Linda Nowlan, staff lawyer with West Coast Environmental Law.

Currently, each distinct protected area  is governed by an individual regulation, which can prohibit and allow certain activities. That’s why the Laurentian Channel Marine Protected Area allows oil and gas activities while the nearby St. Anns Bank Marine Protected Area banned them.

In comparison, Canada’s “National Marine Conservation Areas” — which include Ontario’s Fathom Five National Marine Park and Quebec’s Saguenay-St. Lawrence Marine Park — have a blanket prohibition of oil and gas activities.

Nowlan suggested the federal government should take advantage of its ongoing amendments to the Oceans Act to prohibit all “harmful activities,” including oil, gas and mineral exploration and development.

“It sets the bar from the start so industries can’t go into negotiations and whittle down protection, which is what seems to have happened in Laurentian Channel,” Nowlan said.

The government is expected to release the final regulations this year.

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Five B.C. Liberal candidates running in the current election are also former lobbyists who advocated for corporations including Chevron, Pacific Northwest LNG and ExxonMobil in the offices of Premier Christy Clark and other top ministers, according to records contained in the B.C. Lobbyist Registry.

None of the candidates’ profiles on the B.C. Liberal’s website note their previous work as lobbyists.

“I am alarmed at the number of lobbyists who are running in this election,” Dermod Travis, executive director of IntegrityBC, told DeSmog Canada.

“It may in fact point to a worrisome trend.”

“It’s not a generally considered a stepping stone in politics to go from being a lobbyist to an elected official. Where B.C. risks not electing a government but electing a boardroom of interests — whether corporate or union, it doesn’t matter,” Travis said. "In this instance it's obviously corporate."

B.C. has no broad rules preventing all former public office holders from moving directly from the public sector into employment as a lobbyist to serve private interests.

In Ontario former politicians must wait 12 months before registering as lobbyists. Federally the 'cooling-off period' is a mandatory five years.

B.C. does impose a one-year cooling-off period for senior politicians and bureaucrats from lobbying their former colleagues in instances where they had “substantial involvement in dealings with an outside entity,” but the system is far from perfect, Travis said.

Former Corporate Lobbyists Running for B.C. Liberals Part of ‘Alarming Trend’: Watchdog https://t.co/LbOCFb2YZG #bcelxn17 #bcpoli

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) April 5, 2017

“We have a ‘defrost period,’ “ Travis said, “because it’s not a mandatory cooling off period even where it exists.”

Multiple loopholes mean former public employees are often exempt from the rules.

“We see people going back and forth sometimes in the revolving door where at one moment they’re in the private sector and in the next, the public sector,” Travis said, adding lobbyists aren’t required to disclose if and when they receive kick backs from companies they secure government funding or contracts for.

These ‘contingency clauses’ are banned at the federal level, but in B.C. are kept secret, further obscuring the power lobbying has in the political process, Travis said.

“What’s happening through that process is special interests, self interests are getting put ahead of the public good.”

So who are the candidates?

Gabe Garfinkel, Christy Clark’s former top aide turned lobbyist, is running for the B.C. Liberal party in the riding of Vancouver-Fairview.

Garfinkel made headlines in 2013 after leaving his position of executive assistant to Christy Clark to work with prominent public relations firm FleishmanHillard which lobbies on behalf of high profile corporate clients like Kinder Morgan.

According to provincial lobbying records, Garfinkel registered to lobby on behalf of Chevron Canada, Fortune Minerals and Port Metro Vancouver among others and frequently listed the Premier as a “target contact” for these meetings.

In his work as a lobbyist representing mining and oil and gas interests, Garfinkel lobbied the office of the premier as well as Environment Minister Mary Polak and Minister of Energy and Mines Bill Bennett.

Jas Johal, candidate for Richmond-Queensborough, was the former director of communications for the BC LNG Alliance and registered to lobby on the behalf of BG Canada, ExxonMobil, Kitimat LNG, LNG Canada, Pacific Northwest LNG, Triton LNG and Woodfibre LNG between 2014 and 2015.

Brenda Locke, candidate for Surrey-Green Timbers, was an MLA between 2001 and 2005 and served as Minister for Mental Health and Addiction Services.

Locke left that position to lobby on behalf of the Massage Therapists’ Association of B.C. as recently as December 2016.

Kim Chan Logan, registered to lobby on behalf of TELUS from 2011 to as recently as March 20, 2017, was previously a ministerial assistant and chief of staff to the Minister of Health Services from 2001 to 2004.

Andrew Wilkinson, the B.C. Liberal Vancouver-Quilchena candidate was former Deputy Minister for Intergovernmental Relations, Deputy Minister of Competition, Science and Enterprise, and Deputy Minister for Economic Development between 2001 and 2006.

Wilkinson was a registered lobbyist for McCarthy Tetrault on behalf of Covanta Energy Corp., Energy companies Vattenfall AB and Kronos Project Management and mining company Thompson Creek Metals.

Between 2010 and 2012 Wilkinson registered to lobby the Premier and Energy and Mines Minister Rich Coleman among others. He previously registered in 2009 to lobby on behalf of Simon Fraser University.

Wilkinson is now the subject of lobbying in his positions as both Minister of Technology, Innovation and Citizens’ Services and Minister of Advanced Education for the B.C. Liberals.

Two additional former B.C. Liberals also left politics to take up lobbying work in the private sector.

Don Fast, former Deputy Minister of Community, Sport and Cultural Development from 2011 to 2013 left to start his own lobby firm, D. Fast Consulting.*

Dimitri Pantazopoulos, former campaign staffer for the B.C. Liberals, principle secretary to Christy Clark between 2011 and 2012 and former Assistant Deputy Minister of Intergovernmental Relations and Trade between 2012 and 2013, left for a career in lobbying.

Between 2013 and 2017 Pantazopoulos lobbied on behalf of Consumer Health Products Canada, Adobe, production company Cavalia, farm fish company Cermaq, Comcast, Johnson&Johnson, Pacific Newspaper Group, Black Press, Uber and Woodside Energy among others.

The back and forth movement between lobby firms and the public sector is a practice Travis considers “an incredible threat to how our system works.”

“It creates too many suspicions as to whose interests are being served.”

* This article has been updated to correctly indicate Fast was the former Deputy Minister of Community, Sport and Cultural Development and not Minister as previously stated.

Image: Premier Christy Clark at a Woodfibre LNG announcement. Photo: Province of B.C. via Flickr

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The fossil fuel industry lobbied the B.C. government more than 22,000 times between April 2010 and October 2016, according to a report released Wednesday by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives as part of the Corporate Mapping Project.

The report also found that 48 fossil fuel companies and associated industry groups have donated $5.2 million to B.C. political parties between 2008 and 2015 — 92 per cent of which has gone to the BC Liberals.

The analysis found seven of the top 10 political donors from the fossil fuel industry are also B.C.’s most active lobbyists.

The Corporate Mapping Project is a six-year research and public engagement initiative jointly led by the University of Victoria, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and the Alberta-based Parkland Institute.

Researchers have painstakingly analyzed lobbying and political donation records to demonstrate the extensive political influence of the fossil fuel industry in B.C.

“I was definitely surprised at the sheer volume of lobbying contacts that we found,” Nick Graham, lead author of the report and PhD candidate at the University of Victoria, told DeSmog Canada.

Spectra Energy, Enbridge, FortisBC, Encana, Chevron Canada, CAPP and Teck Resources conducted the majority of registered lobbying contacts, more than 19,500 in total since the lobbyist registry was first initiated in 2010 — an average of 14 lobbying contacts in B.C. per day.

“We were expecting to see some overlap between political donations and lobbying,” Graham said. “Part of what donations help achieve is access to government so we certainly expected to see some of that.”

The top 10 fossil fuel industry donors were responsible for $3.8 million in contributions to the BC Liberals and $270,000 to the BC NDP.

The Corporate Mapping Project report, co-authored by Shannon Daub of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and Bill Carroll, professor of sociology at the University of Victoria, is the first systematic analysis of fossil fuel lobbying in B.C.

Top 10 fossil fuel industry donors in B.C. Source: CCPA, Corporate Mapping Project.

Clear Connection Between Lobbying, Donations and Policy Outcomes

“There is a fairly clear connection between lobbying, donations and policy outcomes that is quite troubling,” Daub told DeSmog Canada.

“It can be difficult to draw a line between a political donation or a meeting and policy because so little information is released to the public about what is going on behind closed doors,” Daub said.

But, she added, a more broad analysis like this can help connect the dots.

“We did note the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, for example, in a one year period between October 2015 and August 2016, reported 201 lobbying contacts with the provincial government specifically in relation to the climate leadership plan.”

“And of course that plan turned out to not be much of a plan at all,” Daub added.

The analysis found 28 per cent of lobbying by the top fossil fuel lobbyists was with cabinet ministers.

Several cabinet ministers were the frequent target of lobbying contacts, the most popular being Minister of Natural Gas Development Rich Coleman, who was listed in 733 contacts with the top 10 fossil fuel firms.

The other most contacted senior ministers are Premier Christy Clark (618 contacts), Minister of Energy and Mines Bill Bennett (437), Environment Minister Mary Polak (354) and Finance Minister Mike de Jong (330).

“It really does speak to the development of these close relationships,” Graham said. “You do see particular firms heavily targeting individuals. There is this really tight, if not cozy, ongoing relationship that develops and the perspective of the two become quite closely aligned.”

Companies such as Encana, with significant operations in B.C.’s natural gas plays focused heavily on lobbying Natural Gas Development Minister Coleman, the analysis found.

Source: CCPA, Corporate Mapping Project

Corporate Influence Far Outweighs Environmental Voices

Graham added the analysis was shaped in part by the B.C. government’s push for increased extractive industry projects in the province for nearly the last decade.

“The paper began from the perspective of seeing this really incredible push around expanding fossil fuel development in the province especially around natural gas and the really aggressive promotion of the LNG industry in particular by the government.”

“Part of our question was, ‘how can we explain this? What explains this?’ ” Graham said.

“What we found are there are multiple explanations that point to the structural power of industry and the provincial government’s reliance on resource rent. But also major corporate influence: the ability of corporations to have these stores of capital to pressure government on an ongoing basis.”

The analysis found a total of 1,300 lobby contacts between the government and environmental or non-governmental organizations during the same timeframe.

Daub said there is clearly not level access to provincial decision-makers in B.C.

“What shows really clearly from these numbers is that we have one industry with a very disproportionate level of access to government and government policy,” she said.

B.C.’s Ongoing Transparency Problem

B.C. has some of the weakest political donation rules in the country, which allow unlimited donations from individuals, foreigners, corporations and unions.

“Clearly it’s just time to ban big money in politics all together. One of the recommendations in our report is to put a stop to corporate and union donations and a cap on individual contributions.”

Federally, political parties cannot accept donations from corporations or unions and provinces like Quebec place a $100 limit on personal donations.

“It’s supposed to be one person, one vote,” Daub said. “Instead in B.C. it’s more like one dollar, one vote.”

A level democratic playing field is important for the public to have confidence in the political system but also to feel they can meaningfully participate in the process, Daub said.

Beyond problems with special interest dollars flooding the political process, B.C. also has poor transparency requirements when it comes to lobbying.

Lobbyists must register to lobby in B.C. and provide a list of intended meetings. However, there is no official record kept that distinguishes between intended and actual meetings.

Any meetings requested by public officials are not registered.

In addition, lobby records do not give the public detailed information about the content of meetings.

“Teck is one of the biggest lobbyists in the province among industry groups and they have a particular focus on MLAs,” Daub said. “But what they report they’ve lobbied on is things like ‘mining,’ or ‘employment and training’ or ‘aboriginal affairs.’ ”

“That doesn’t tell us anything about what they’re actually talking to these public officials about.”

Daub said better records should be kept of lobbying interactions that gives the public a decent account of when and how frequently these meetings are taking place and what public policy matters are at stake.

“A more transparent system would make it much easier for the public to find out what is going on in these closed door meetings.”

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The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), Canada’s largest oil and gas lobbyist group, asked the federal government to introduce a carbon pricing scheme that would “recycle” revenues back into oil and gas operations, documents released via Freedom of Information legislation reveal.

The documents, released to Greenpeace Canada, contain an August 2016 submission CAPP provided to the federal government in which the group argues a price on carbon should be revenue neutral for industry.

“One of the decisions governments need to make is what to do with the revenue generated from the carbon pricing mechanism,” the document reads. “There are many options available to enable innovation for distribution of this generated revenue; CAPP recommends that to enable innovation, revenue generated by industrial emitters is best recycled back to industry for technology and innovation.”

Keith Stewart, senior energy strategist for Greenpeace Canada, says, “The oil industry formally supports action on climate change (in exchange for pipeline approvals) but wants to shape how the policy is implemented so as to minimize the impact on its own operations.”

In a summary piece for Policy Options, Stewart says the recommendation to channel carbon taxes back into industry operations “dramatically weakens the effectiveness of the federal policy.”

“The primacy advantage of a carbon price is that it sends an economy-wide signal to investors and consumers, leading to a shift to lower-carbon options. If the largest share of the revenue goes back to the oil industry, the signal to investors to switch to low-carbon energy is muted.”

Pressure from CAPP comes as the federal government is preparing to release the first Gazette I version of greenhouse gas emissions for the oil and gas sector later this month.

Industry lobbying efforts successfully staved off greenhouse gas emission regulations for the oil and gas sector throughout the entirety of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s 10-year rule. Further lobbying efforts also stymied a European effort to label fuel from the Alberta oilsands as more carbon intensive than other fossil fuels.

Under the international Paris Agreement and the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change, Canada has committed to a 2030 target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 524 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, a 30 per cent reduction from 2005 emission levels.

Environment and Climate Change Canada estimates new oil and gas regulations will reduce emissions by 20 megatonnes (MT), greater than Nova Scotia’s total emissions at 17 MT.

The upstream oil and gas sector is Canada’s fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions.

In addition to imposing a nationwide carbon pricing mechanism — provinces have until 2018 to implement one or have one imposed — the federal government is also implementing regulations to reduce methane emissions from the oil and gas sector.

CAPP Lobbies Government to ‘Recycle’ #CarbonTax Revenues Back to Oil Industry https://t.co/U6ydduAMfn #ableg #cdnpoli @carollinnitt pic.twitter.com/JEtq49vlNk

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) March 3, 2017

CAPP’s Fight Against Methane Regulations

Additional internal documents released to Greenpeace Canada show CAPP overestimated the cost of implementation and argued the new rules will damage industry’s competitiveness.

“Canadian production is already at risk of being displaced by U.S. competition,” a CAPP presentation made to the federal government in September 2016 reads.

It is “not a good time to impose additional costs on industry,” a slide states.

In March 2016, former president Barack Obama and Justin Trudeau announced an ambitious plan to nearly halve methane emissions from the oil and gas sector by 2025.

In Canada the reductions would be the equivalent of removing every passenger car from the roads in both B.C. and Alberta.

Canada’s forthcoming methane regulations are expected to outline how the sector will achieve those reduction targets.

CAPP, however, recommended the federal government delay implementation of methane regulations beyond the currently proposed 2020 and argued some aspects of the rules, such as mandatory retrofitting of all equipment or regular equipment inspections, should be voluntary.

CAPP’s argument that the new rules are too costly is simply a negotiating tactic, Stewart says.

“CAPP says that the cost to industry of implementing the federal methane regulations would be roughly triple what Environment Canada calculates: $4.1 billion over eight years, compared with Environment Canada’s estimate of $1.3 billion,” Stewart writes.

“Industry push-back on environmental regulations is to be expected and is most effective when conducted behind closed doors.”

Image: Machinery operates in the Alberta oilsands. Photo: Kris Krug/DeSmog

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If you read any commentary in the wake of Trudeau’s pipeline approvals, you might have come across the sentiment that pipeline opponents are “environmental NIMBYs” and “angry mobs” who are “stuck in bondage to strange ideologies…eyes ablaze with truth oil,” having “demolished trust in agencies.”

Conversely, pipeline proponents are “realistic” and “rational,” able to offer up “informed discussion and courtesy” due to their nuanced understandings of economics and deep respect for regulatory processes.

“In the current political climate, if you disagree with an economic model or the critical assumptions underlying it you court the risk of being labelled an extremist or emotional, or simply unqualified to participate in the debate,” says Jason MacLean, assistant professor of law at Lakehead University and author of two recent Maclean’s essays on climate policy.

It’s a quaint notion: proponents of oilsands and pipeline expansion are mere technocrats only trying to do what’s best for Canada but are being tragically derailed by rabid protesters who don’t care about facts and figures.

But it disguises the much deeper fact that fossil fuel companies exist for the sole purpose of ensuring maximum returns for their shareholders.

Writing off industry opponents as blindly anti-everything ignores the incredible amount of sociopolitical influence the fossil fuel industry deploys to maintain its position in an increasingly carbon-constrained world.

Fossil Fuel Industry’s Barriers to a Low-Carbon Economy

“Private investments of [the fossil fuel industry’s] magnitude create an enormous inertia because the investors will want their money back and investments recuperated, and profit in the end,” Andreas Malm, author of Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, told DeSmog Canada.

“That means they will fight tooth and nail to maintain the infrastructures for as long as possible and for as long as they can generate revenue.”

Despite a clear and urgent need to transition our energy systems to renewable sources, dismantling fossil fuel-based infrastructure has proven “very, very difficult to do,” says Malm, who serves as an associate senior lecturer in human ecology at Sweden’s Lund University.

“Efforts to mitigate climate change have generally been very naive about how deeply rooted fossil fuels are in certain power structures related to wealth accumulation.”

“Their business interests are at stake here,” he concludes. “They want to survive. They want to continue digging fossil fuels out of the ground. As long as they are not challenged, we won’t make any progress on climate.”

From supercharged lobbying efforts to hefty political donations to high-profile public relations campaigns that influence even our deepest personal notions of freedom, the fossil fuel industry plays an aggressive role in contouring the politically possible  — all in an effort to keep opponents and alternatives at bay.

Fossil Fuels and the Making of a Carbon-Dependent Way of Life

A common refrain from fossil fuel companies and associations is that their products underpin our entire way of life.

In many ways, this is true.

As Bob Johnson, associate professor of history at National University in San Diego and author of Carbon Nation: Fossil Fuels in the Making of American Culture, points out, everything from cooking soup on a stove, to practising hot yoga, to flying across the country to visit relatives for Christmas, to protecting national parks from deforestation draws on the availability of cheap fossil fuels.

But it’s also no coincidence that we’re living in a society completely dependent on fossil fuels.

“That way of life had to be engineered,” says Timothy Mitchell, chair and professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University and author of Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil.

“The oil companies and others worked very hard to create a way of life that would become enormously dependent on oil and carbon-heavy: gas-guzzling automobiles, to interstate highway systems, to suburban life, to any number of ways of living to which there were always alternatives.”

It might sound conspiratorial. But there are many examples of fossil fuel companies directly funding efforts to deny climate change, including ExxonMobil and Talisman Energy (in 2004, the latter funnelled money to the notorious Friends of Science group, which claims climate change is caused by solar flares).

Mitchell says industry has also done a lot to encourage car-based cultures, including sponsoring and publishing travel guides, maps and ads in which the car became a centrepiece of consumer lifestyles.

Johnson said that’s been aided by the work of think tanks and industry associations — including the Cato Institute (started and funded by Charles Koch) and the American Petroleum Institute — creating a deep cultural relationship between concepts of mobility and freedom.

Johnson says an industry film in the 1950s proposed a Petroleum Bill of Rights, taking the U.S. Constitution and assigning relationships between specific articles and petroleum, such as the freedom of movement and travel.

“These are people and institutions whose goal is to shape public opinion through things like children’s programming, editorials, buying up newspaper influence, having journalists in hand and subsidizing politicized science,” Johnson says.

As the University of Ottawa’s Patrick McCurdy has identified with his MediaToil project, multi-million dollar advertising campaigns by corporations have strategically evolved over the years in response to criticisms, with recent efforts targeting “lifestyle rhetoric.”

Enbridge’s recent “Life Takes Energy” campaign directly connects “dinner with dad,” “amazing journeys” and caring for one’s newborn child to oil and gas products.

While not technically wrong, this and other industry campaigns are designed to obscure the ways societies can actually make choices about the types of energy used.

Many of our energy demands can be at least partly met with a substituted combination of solar, wind and geothermal, accompanied by significant investments in public transit infrastructure, energy efficiency and smart grids. Municipalities can be key players in such scenarios, with the powers to amend zoning bylaws, limit urban sprawl via developer levies, approve bike lanes and cycle tracks, and even plant more trees to reduce demands on air conditioning.

There are many alternatives. But you won’t hear such ideas in fossil fuel advertisements.

Fossil Fuel Industry and the Purchase of Political Influence

But the fossil fuel industry invests in much more than public relations campaigns. Lobbying and political donations are also ways industry can leverage its economic capital for political influence.

In Canada fossil fuel companies and associations have lobbied the federal government hundreds of times since they were elected in October 2015.

Major players include Suncor (96 times), CAPP (84 times), Enbridge (66 times), Imperial Oil (62 times), Shell Canada (59 times), TransCanada (39 times), Northern Gateway (38 times) and Kinder Morgan (26 times).

And those are only the communications that we know about.

Under the current iteration of the Lobbying Act, lobbyists only have to log “oral, prearranged” communications, which leaves emails, texts, letters and speaking at a “non-prearranged time” wide open.

Duff Conacher, founder and long-time coordinator of Democracy Watch, says the ongoing federal cash-for-access scandal — in which people paid $1,525 to attend one of 100 Liberal fundraisers in private homes and have the chance to lobby Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and high-ranking cabinet ministers — was almost certainly taken advantage of by fossil fuel executives, even if that fact remains undocumented.

“It’s completely undemocratic and unethical for the government to keep this information secret,” Conacher says.

Fossil fuel companies are some of the largest companies in the country, meaning they have considerable resources to dedicate to toward activities like hiring lobbyists and potentially hosting or attending fundraisers.

Conacher also notes that while corporate donations were banned at the federal level in 2007, it’s still possible that companies use executives, managers, spouses and family members to secretly donate to a party and riding association using corporate money; an Elections Quebec audit identified $12.8 million in likely funnelled donations from corporations to provincial parties between 2006 and 2011.

“We essentially have a system of legalized bribery with our donation system and secret unethical lobbying,” Conacher says. “You put those two together and you’re going to have corruption of the decisions that cabinet ministers make across the country.”

The ‘Revolving Door’ Between Industry and Politics

All of those actions take place from the outside, with lobbyists and executives pushing for change either legally or otherwise.

But industry also has significant influence from the inside of governments.

“We see an easy trafficking between fossil industry players and government agencies: a revolving door between the carbon industry and politics,” Johnson says.

Powerful industry players in Canada have gone on to sit on environmental review panels, lead staff at the ministry of natural resources and lead political campaigns.

The embeddedness of industry players in the upper political echelon can have real world consequence, Johnson says.

“You end up with really soft regulations, really slippery policy language, the giveaways of mineral rights.”

For instance, Janet Annesley, the former head of CAPP and current chief of staff for Natural Resources Canada, has officially met twice with her former employer, CAPP, as well as members of CAPP, including Suncor, Encana and CNRL.

Tracing Fossil Fuel Influence Through Political Cycle

And these three factors — advertising, lobbying and appointments — all achieve maximum influence in our current electoral system.

Imre Szeman, Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies and co-director of the University of Alberta’s Petrocultures research cluster, says that for him, the approvals of the Trans Mountain and Line 3 pipelines are an outcome of Trudeau’s political calculation.

The pipelines, he said, go hand in hand with the government’s controversial backtracking on electoral reform.

“We operate by means of a government form that was established in the 18th century: post-monarchy, constitutional democracies that operate on a four-year electoral cycle,” Szeman says.

“Once again, we have a situation where governments are more concerned with their own electoral possibilities than making true, long-term decisions about what they’re going to do.”

Entrenched, powerful interests greatly benefit from a system in which politicians must think very short-term in scope.

Fossil fuel companies generate a significant amount of GDP, exports, capital investments, jobs and government revenues, which are good selling points for a government that must have numbers to show come election time.

Malm says the obvious first step to managing climate change — let alone solving it — is to put an end to any expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure. Others have argued the same.

But political parties want to win elections. And fossil fuel companies will do everything they can to exploit that fact, in desperate attempt to maximize profits from huge capital investments in an increasingly carbon-constrained world.

It’s an extremely dangerous combo.

“When you have a very powerful industry that’s important to the GDP, it’s going to have major effects on what the government does,” Szeman concludes.

“This is a matter of social survival for all of us in the long run.”

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Since the Liberals formed government last November, Enbridge and Northern Gateway Pipeline have lobbied Ottawa an astounding 86 times, federal lobbying reports reveal.

Fifty-one of those meetings have taken place since August — which, funnily enough, is around the same time Prime Minister Justin Trudeau started backtracking on his commitment to ban oil tankers on B.C.’s north coast, a policy that would leave Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline proposal dead in the water.

Since October last year, representatives from Enbridge and Northern Gateway Pipeline met with representatives from the Prime Minister’s Office eight times, Transport Canada 10 times, Fisheries and Oceans Canada 10 times, Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada 12 times, Natural Resources Canada 31 times, and mostly Liberal Members of Parliament 39 times to name just a few.

During this time Enbridge and Northern Gateway Pipeline lobbyists met with more than 130 top-level chiefs of staff, policy directors, and ministers, records show.

Diesel Spill Off B.C. Coast Creating New Urgency Around Promised Tanker Ban

The issue of oil transport along the B.C. coast has been thrust back into the spotlight in the wake of ongoing diesel spill recovery efforts near Bella Bella.

Coastal residents were in a state of disbelief last night after learning an emergency response vessel, sent to B.C.’s central coast to retrieve the diesel-leaking Nathan E. Stewart, sank beside the sunken tug in windswept waters.

Since October 13, cleanup of the diesel spill in the traditional waters of the Heiltsuk First Nation has been slow and unsuccessful, hampered by a lack of response equipment, relief crews and favourable weather.

This has heightened criticism of the federal government and Trudeau who made a clear commitment to enact an oil tanker ban for the north B.C. coast during his election campaign last year. Trudeau even included formalizing the tanker ban on the list of ‘top priorities’ in Transport Minister Marc Garneau’s mandate letter in early November last year.

When pressed on his promise to ban tanker traffic — a proposal some say is not nearly comprehensive enough to protect the coast from vessels like the Nathan E. Stewart —Trudeau awkwardly dodged the question.

“Over the past year there’s been a lot of underinvestment by the federal government in marine safety and spill response. That’s something we’re absolutely committed to turning around,” Trudeau told Breakfast Television.

“And one of the symbols of that — as someone who knows Vancouver and the Lower Mainland as well as I do — one of the first things we did was reopen the Kits coast guard base because we understand that having responders there if something happens is absolutely essential.”

Jess Housty, tribal councillor for the Heiltsuk, took to Twitter to express her dismay with the Prime Minister’s comments.

“Saw your interview today,” Housty tweeted. “You know Kits is ~650km away from Bella Bella and Seaforth Channel, right?”

Nathan Cullen, MP for the Skeena-Bulkley Valley region in B.C. and environment critic for the NDP, said it is incredibly frustrating for coastal people to have the federal government stall on the tanker ban.

“When we are talking about protecting the coast out here, for the people who live here, that’s life and death,” Cullen told DeSmog Canada.

“The insult is twice because the promise was twofold: one, to bring in a tanker ban. It’s been a year and we’re still waiting. Two, to establish respectful relations with First Nations.”

“This is literally killing two birds with one stone,” Cullen said.

He added Trudeau’s inability to follow through on his promises is indication of a dangerous duplicity.

“We are a year in and one has to wonder if there are two Justin Trudeaus. One that campaigns and does public events and Twitter. The other that meets in the private backrooms in Ottawa with more oil lobbyists — one would imagine by a factor of 10 — than he has with environmental and First Nation leaders.”

Cullen said it isn’t just the diesel spill near Bella Bella that British Columbians have to worry about, but the pending decision on the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline.

“You wonder if the West Coast is being thrown under the bus for nothing other than political calculation.”

John Horgan, leader of the B.C.NDP, said the response to what is unfolding in Bella Bella at both the federal and the provincial level has been “frustrating” and “astounding.”

“It does really speak to an Ottawa-based arrogance to believe that reigniting the much-needed Coast Guard base in Vancouver is somehow a benefit to the coast north of Vancouver Island all the way to Prince Rupert,” Horgan told DeSmog Canada.

When asked about Enbridge and Northern Gateway’s recent lobbying spree, Horgan said “the government should spend more time with the people of B.C. when considering these problems and less with those lobbying government offices.”

Lobbying Records Disclose the Bare Minimum: Watchdog

These high volumes of lobbying are troubling, according to Duff Conacher, co-founder of Democracy Watch, a government accountability watchdog.

“Everybody should be worried about the power of large corporations in terms of lobbying governments,” Conacher told DeSmog Canada.

“They not only have economic power in terms of threatening to sue under trade deals or to take their business elsewhere…but they also usually hire people who have connections to the ruling party to do their lobbying so they have undue and unethical political power as well.”

Conacher said Enbridge and Northern Gateway could be doing a lot more lobbying of the federal government without any disclosure due to vast amounts of lobbying loopholes.

The documented lobbying by Enbridge and Northern Gateway is likely just scratching the surface, he said.

“Only oral pre-arranged meetings are required to be documented in those monthly logs. So you shouldn’t think that’s all the lobbying: that’s just the lobbying they disclosed.”

– With files from James Wilt

Enbridge Northern Gateway Lobbying Aug 2015-Oct 2016 – Sheet1 by DeSmog Canada on Scribd

Image: Justin Trudeau via Flickr

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