During her recent election campaign, Alberta NDP leader Rachel Notley pledged to raise Alberta’s minimum wage from $10.20 an hour to $15 by 2018, which would make the province’s minimum wage the highest in the country — by far.

Not so fast, objects economist Ron Kneebone. In a National Post commentary a week after the election, Kneebone argues that raising the minimum wage will do little to fight poverty. He suggests other, less achievable, policies.

Notley’s platform also included a pledge to raise corporate tax rates, review oil and gas royalties and cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Not so fast, objects economist Jack Mintz. In a National Post article published the day after Kneebone, Mintz asks, “how many times can you skin the cat?” If Notley raises corporates taxes, capital will take flight, he predicts. “Some companies are planning to shift profits out of Alberta if the rate goes up to 12 per cent,” he says, as if profits don’t already leave the province because the energy sector is mainly foreign owned.

A third promise Notley made was to promote the upgrading and refining of Alberta’s natural resources within the province to deliver better value to Albertans.

Not so fast, objects economist Trevor Tombe. In a National Post commentary six days after Mintz, Tombe calculates that oil and gas extraction adds more value per job than refining. But the real comparison should be refining in Alberta compared with refining — and adding value — elsewhere.

Aside from being economists, having serious problems with NDP proposals and getting major play in the National Post, Kneebone, Mintz and Tombe share something else: they are associated with the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy (SPP). Mintz is school director, Kneebone director of the tax and economic growth program, and Tombe an economics department academic who publishes frequently through the SPP.

In just one month, the SPP had taken three swipes at Notley’s platform.[view:in_this_series=block_1]

And there will be more to come because the SPP isn’t just a degree-granting academic institution, it’s also an industry-supported think tank embedded within the university.

Like all industry-backed think tanks, the SPP’s purpose is to produce research that supports the industry and the free market. If Notley strays too far afield from industry consensus, rest assured the SPP will be on her case.

Industry’s Big (Reputational) Problem

Canada’s oil and gas industry has had a big problem: it’s the least trusted source of information about energy issues.

This was a key finding of a survey commissioned in February 2015 by Alberta Oil, a magazine, as DeSmog’s Emma Gilchrist points out, “destined for the desks of the energy sector’s senior executives and decision-makers.”

These energy sector executives may oppose minimum-wage and corporate-tax hikes and increased oil sands refining in Alberta, but it’s futile for them to fulminate publicly about Notley’s plans, if the Alberta Oil survey is to be believed.

Only 14 per cent of survey respondents found energy company executives to be a credible source of information on oilsands development, and just 11 per cent trusted industry information about carbon emissions.

Perhaps the tens of millions of dollars Enbridge was spending to promote its pipelines and the millions more spent by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers to persuade Canadians about the amazing benefits of oil sands development were well and truly wasted.

But Alberta Oil’s survey did reveal a ray of hope for the industry. At 53 per cent, respondents regarded the academic community as the most trusted and credible source of information. So if industry executives can’t speak for the industry, perhaps academics can.

The School of Public Policy, Born of Oil Money 

The School of Public Policy was established in 2008 with a donation of $4 million from James Palmer, one of Canada’s leading oil and gas lawyers, Palmer perhaps recognizing industry’s credibility problems. At the time, all three major Alberta political parties were calling for higher royalties.

Who would speak for the industry?

With Palmer’s money the university hired tax specialist Jack Mintz, CEO of the corporate-sponsored C.D. Howe Institute, to head the SPP. Like C.D. Howe, corporate influence in the SPP is heavy. The connections to one company in particular — Imperial Oil — are extensive. (This is not to suggest that industry money can buy supportive academic research, but that academics sympathetic to business and conservative viewpoints are recruited for such positions.)

Mintz himself is an Imperial Oil director and a director of the Imperial Oil Foundation, that doles out $6-to-$7 million a year to organizations in communities where Imperial Oil operates, to build good will. Like all directors, Mintz is obligated to advance the best interests of the company, as former Alberta Liberal leader Kevin Taft points out. “The directors, in exercising their powers and discharging their duties, shall act honestly and in good faith with a view to the best interests of the corporation,” says Imperial Oil’s 2014 Management Proxy Circular. As head of SPP, Mintz’s loyalties seem murky.

Palmer was one of Canada’s most celebrated energy lawyers (he died in 2013), specializing in corporate mergers and acquisitions. He was on the boards of numerous oil and gas companies and for a few years lobbied the federal government for Imperial Oil and its parent company, ExxonMobil, promoting their oil pipeline proposals.

Imperial Oil CEO Tim Hearn had just retired and joined the SPP’s advisory council; his company donated $1 million to the school and another $200,000 several years later. Hearn’s successor, Bruce Marsh, was a featured speaker at SPP’s kick-off conference. Jean-Sébastien Rioux, recruited to lead the SPP’s Master’s program, had previously headed Imperial Oil’s lobbying and public relations efforts.

The school seems a marriage of business, ideology and politics. A decade before it was established, a group of political scientists, historians, and economists at the university emerged as the intellectual backup for neoliberal and social-conservative causes.

Advancing the Conservative Agenda

Dubbed the Calgary School, these academics coalesced around arguments to slash social programs, downsize government, promote business, deregulate the economy, and cut taxes. Led by political scientist Tom Flanagan, the Calgary School had enormous influence on federal policy and politics.

It helped shape the direction of the Reform Party and Canadian Alliance and dominated the thinking of Stephen Harper, who studied under Calgary School professors, selected one — Flanagan — as a close adviser, and picked the student of another — Ian Brodie, who studied under political scientist Ted Morton — as his first chief of staff.

After the school was up and running, the entire Calgary School migrated into its ranks. Brodie became director of research, Flanagan a distinguished fellow and Morton an executive in residence. Economist Robert Mansell, a Calgary School associate who had been one of Harper’s professors, became the SPP’s academic director.

Four SPP program directors, including Kneebone, are, or were, Fraser Institute fellows. SPP receives about $200,000 a year from Peter Munk’s Aurea Foundation, which has emerged in recent years as paymaster to the right through its funding of the Fraser Institute and other neoliberal think tanks.

And there are the political connections. Flanagan is well-known as a mentor to former Wildrose leader Danielle Smith; Morton was a minister of Energy in the Ed Stelmach government; and Jean-Sébastien Rioux was chief of staff to Jim Prentice when he was federal minister of Indian Affairs and Industry.

Given the funding and the lineup of personnel, it’s not surprising that SPP’s research is hostile to Notley’s program.

They’ll be carefully monitoring the NDP’s moves on the energy and environment files. SPP authors have already sounded the alarm that Alberta must get its bitumen to markets in the Pacific Rim as quickly as possible, or risk losing out to competitors. Canada needs to get on with the Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain expansion projects as quickly as possible, the authors urge.

A paper by Trevor Tombe about “the facts” on Canada’s energy trade presents as one fact the claim that promoting energy trade “requires lowering investment barriers and creating a predictable and stable investment climate for foreign direct investment,” certainly not the capital flight that Jack Mintz threatens.

Notley will be looking across the legislative aisle for clues to opposition strategies. She should also be looking over her shoulder to the School of Public Policy for the “research” and policy that will provide the real opposition to her government.

Image: Industry Minister James Moore speaks at a Calgary School event via Flickr

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

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

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

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

What’s God Got to Do With It?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But there are also the numbers to consider.

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

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

Faith in the Free Market

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did it work?

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

Send in the Auditors and the Spies

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some intelligence assessment.

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

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

That’s how Stephen Harper makes his world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She would be playing a pretty significant role for them.

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

Image Credit: Prime Minister's Photo Gallery

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.