In Ottawa there has always been a level of disconnect between the issues that really matter to Canadians and the issues that seem important to Canadian politicians working on Parliament Hill.  

In the United States this phenomenon is called "beltway politics" where the issues being debated by politicians within the boundaries of Highway 495, which forms a beltway around Washington, D.C., have relatively little importance to anybody outside the beltway.

Spend too long in the beltway and strange things can happen. For instance, a president can speak passionately on the issue of climate change, but hem and haw over whether to approve an oil pipeline that will lock in massive amounts of new greenhouse gas emissions. 

Nobody knows more about this inside political game than the lobbyists. Lobbyists are the people paid by corporations, and to a much lesser extent non-profit organizations, to ensure government policies and decisions by politicians are of the most benefit to those paying them. Lobbyists (at least the good ones) know that their most powerful strategy is to control the flow of information politicians receive on important issues. 

If you control the information, you control the questions that are raised and debated and ultimately you have good odds of controlling the final outcome.[view:in_this_series=block_1]

So for instance, if a story comes out in the popular press questioning the safety of new oil pipelines, lobbyists for the oil companies will work their tails off to ensure that political representatives and government staff are provided the "real facts" on pipeline safety in the country. Outside of reactive type work like this, it is the job of the lobbyist to meet as often as possible with politicians and government staff to provide an ongoing stream of new and "helpful" information.  

This constant barrage of information over time can actually create what myself and many others call the "lobby bubble" — a soundproof barrier of information created around politicians and government staff that is almost impenetrable to outside influence. 

Canada's new Prime Minister-designate Justin Trudeau has just come off the election trail where he has spent hundreds of hours talking to Canadians about what is important to them. Trudeau has also made many promises that reflect the needs and wants of the electorate. Trudeau right now is more in touch with Canadians than he will likely ever be in his term as prime minister, because the moment he steps into the PMO the lobby bubble will begin to form. 

The flow of information to Trudeau is about to shift from things he heard in the streets of Halifax, Vancouver and Montreal, to things he heard at a meeting he just had with representatives from the oil industry, health industry, insurance industry, agricultural industry and so on.

If you think I am over dramatizing the situation, think for a second about the logistics alone. How often does the average Canadian get to fly to Ottawa and sit down face-to-face with the prime minister to discuss their concerns about a new pipeline planned to run through their backyard? 

Now how often do you think the lobbyist with the office down the street from Parliament Hill, whose well-compensated full-time job is to lobby Members of Parliament, will get to meet with Trudeau and his staff over the coming years?

Heck, I would be happy to bet that most Ottawa lobbyists will have more drinks with Liberal government staffers in the next year than the number of everyday Canadians who will get to sit down face-to-face with the prime minister to voice their concerns over the next four-year term. That's a bet I would happily lose if this didn't turn out to be the case. 

Take for instance TransCanada Pipelines, the main proponent behind the Keystone XL and the Energy East pipelines. According to the Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying, TransCanada has 18 company officials currently registered in the lobbyist database. And then there is the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, an association supported by oil companies like TransCanada to also lobby the government. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers currently has a whopping 32 registered lobbyists.

This is just a small sample of the corporate lobbyists that work everyday on Parliament Hill to help fill the lobby bubble with new information. You can go here and take a look at the lobbyist registry yourself to get a better idea of just how large the lobby sector is in Ottawa.

As the old saying goes: "If you don't like what your government is doing you have the opportunity to vote them out every four years."

And that is of course a very true statement, but for the other 1,459 days between elections, if the lobbyists and the companies they represent don't like what their government is doing, they can just meet face-to-face with whoever is in charge.

That's a pretty raw deal for voters and it does not have to be this way.

Next up in this series, I will discuss ways Trudeau can avoid the lobby bubble, or even pop it if he felt so obliged.  

Image: Justin Trudeau via Flickr

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A new report recently released by InfluenceMap shows a number of oil and gas companies publicly throwing their support behind climate initiatives are simultaneously obstructing those same efforts through lobbying activities.

The report, Big Oil and the Obstruction of Climate Regulations, comes on the heels of the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, a list of climate measures released by the CEOs of 10 major oil and gas companies including BP, Shell, Statoil and Total.

According to InfluenceMap the initiative is an attempt by leading energy companies to “improve their image in the face of longstanding criticism of their business practices ahead of UN COP 21 climate talks in Paris.”

“The big European companies behind the OGCI…will come under ever greater scrutiny, as the distance between the companies’ professed positions and the realities of the lobbying actions of their trade bodies grows ever starker,” InfluenceMap stated in a press release.

The group’s analysis shows a major disconnect between climate rhetoric and action among three key policy strands: carbon tax, emissions trading and greenhouse has emissions regulations.

The findings show companies like Shell and Total publicly support carbon pricing while at the same time support trade organizations that systematically obstruct the legislation’s implementation.

Oil majors BP, Chevron and Exxon also support these lobby groups but spend less time publicly supporting a price on carbon.  

Dylan Tanner, executive director of InfluenceMap, said industry is becoming more cautious of public oversight and as a result, has become subtler with its efforts to subvert climate progress. 

“Companies like Shell appear to have shifted their direct opposition to climate legislation to certain key trade associations in the wake of increasing scrutiny,” Tanner said.

“Investors and engagers need to be aware that these powerful energy and chemicals-sector trade bodies are financed by, and act on the instruction of, their key members and should thus be regarded as extensions of such corporate-member activity and positions."

The report shows Shell’s official messaging is wildly inconsistent with the positions of its trade associations.

Shell, for example, states on its website, “we support an international framework that puts a price on CO2.” However, green taxation working group BusinessEurope warned against such measures, suggesting they could threaten the “international competitiveness of EU industry.”

Shell executive An Theeuwes is chair of BusinessEurope's Green Taxation Working Group.*

Excerpt from InfluenceMap report shows disconnect between Shell's corporate statements and those of trade organizations supported by Shell.

Shell is also on the board of a powerful chemicals trade body in Europe, the CEFIC, that lobbied aggressively against the European Emissions Trading Scheme.

Shell is also a member of the American Petroleum Institute and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, North America's two most powerful industry lobby groups actively involved in opposing climate legislation. API's CEO recently criticized the UN climate talks as driven by a “narrow political ideology” and CAPP has previously disregarded opposition to the Alberta oilsands as merely "ideological" while arguing against new emissions standards. 

"If oil and gas companies calling for a price on carbon want to be taken seriously it is imperative that they commit both to calling on governments to implement such a policy and at the same time ensuring that all their lobbying is 100 per cent consistent with this objective,” Anthony Hobley, CEO of Carbon Tracker, said.  

“This is a strong line to take that has to be held accountable by investors, shareholders, governments and the public."

Carbon Tracker recently released a report that finds energy companies rely too heavily on industry scenarios that project high fossil fuel consumption in the future. The analysis shows industry uses high demand assumptions “to justify new and costly capital investment to shareholders.”

Companies that are inconsistent in what they say publicly and do behind the scenes don’t deserve to be taken seriously, Hobley said.

This kind of disingenuous activity “should be seen for what it is,” he said: “a cynical attempt to manipulate public opinion and create the perception amongst shareholders that the company is taking the issue of climate change seriously."

* This article was updated to reflect An Theeuwes' position as chair of BusinessEurope's Green Taxation Working Group.

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The purpose of the National Energy Board, like any regulator, is to be unprofitable. They perform unprofitable environmental assessments to make sure we have access to unprofitable clean drinking water and preserve unprofitable nature for unprofitable future generations. That’s because citizens value things beyond profits, and the National Energy Board represents citizens. In theory… 

One of the last things the Harper government did before it launched the federal election was to appoint Steven Kelly, who is a consultant for Kinder Morgan, to the National Energy Board. This guy was paid to convince the government to approve the expansion of the Kinder Morgan pipeline. And now he’ll be part of the team that helps to decide if his own argument was convincing. If the pipeline review process was a cutest baby competition, we just hired the baby’s mom.

In fact, over half of NEB’s board members are pipeline mommies, a.k.a. oil industry professionals. Which is probably why the Kinder Morgan pipeline review processes has been widely condemned as a farce. The NEB refuses to take climate change into consideration in their review, even though scientists have made clear that more pipelines will lock us into a very hot, very grim future. But the fossil fuel industry, and their representatives in the NEB, are content to watch the world burn, as long as they can make money selling the matches.

There’s good evidence that the NEB no longer represents citizens and no longer works in the public interest. That could change before any more pipelines get built, depending on which Canadians are interested enough in their interests to vote on October 19th.

This video originally appeared in The Toronto Star. 

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In the wake of the NDP’s new majority government in Alberta, Steve Williams, the CEO of Suncor, announced that he believes climate change is happening and the right way to address it is a carbon tax that applies to both producers and consumers.

Well it’s pretty obvious what happened here. Steve Williams read Naomi Klein’s “This Changes Everything” and was so inspired by her vision of a just, sustainable future that he set short-term considerations of profit aside for his deeply held moral convictions, in preparation for his eventual ascension unto heaven. Or maybe there’s something else going on…

Maybe the oil industry knows that funding climate denial is a losing battle, so they’re falling back to their next line of defense. “Yes, okay, climate change is happening, but how can we pretend to care in a way that costs us the least amount of money? And can we fit the word green into it? Or maybe a picture of a baby lemur?"

Corporations don’t have morals, they’re profit-making robots. They’re run by people, and those people are often perfectly nice. But if they don’t work the controls properly, the robot will crap them into the unemployment line.

I know Canadians are supposed to be polite, but if we’re serious about doing our part to avoid catastrophic climate change, we should consider being a lot less polite to the oil industry. They’ve shown really bad manners by spending millions to block climate action to protect their billions in profits, so maybe we shouldn’t focus on whatever solution offends them the least.

Maybe it’s time to be straight up rude and uncivilized and take some of those billions and spend them on creating jobs in renewable energy, to make the transition we’re way overdue on. Or we could create a new robot to go back in time and terminate James Watt and Henry Ford. Both solid options I think.

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At an estimated 2,700 litres, the bunker fuel spill in English Bay was relatively small — yet the stakes of that spill couldn’t be much higher.

With Enbridge and Kinder Morgan both hoping to build oil pipelines to B.C., which would significantly increase oil tanker traffic in the province’s inside coastal waters, a dramatically mishandled marine oil spill raises all sorts of questions — questions the federal government does not appear well-positioned to answer, despite its aggressive push for West Coast oil exports.

“Obviously, from the oil industry’s perspective, you couldn’t have picked a worse place to have an oil spill,” Jim Stanford, economist at Unifor and founder of the Progressive Economics Forum, told DeSmog Canada.

While the federal government insisted its response was “world-class,” a former commander of the shuttered Kits Coast Guard station blamed the six-hour delay in even deploying a boom to contain the oil on the closure of that station in 2013 — a move that is reported to have saved the federal government at estimated $700,000 a year.

The English Bay spill, beyond being a systemic failure, has been a total PR disaster.

“It’s a very dramatic indication of the failure of our environmental safeguards around transportation and energy,” Stanford said.

Will The Real Energy Superpower Please Stand Up

Canada’s aggressive “energy superpower” push — a Harper government priority that has been accompanied by the elimination of environmental laws— has drawn criticism from all corners, and not just domestically.

The Obama administration indicated the fate of TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline, which has been caught in a protracted review process for six years, was intrinsically tied up with the oilsands’ growing greenhouse gas emissions. The European Union came close to labelling oilsand’s crude as high-carbon due to its energy-intensive extraction and refining process (that move was thwarted by intensive lobbying by the Canadian and Albertan governments). 

Back at home, the undercutting of environmental reviews and elimination of environmental laws has resulting in growing citizen concern about Canada’s oilsands development and record on climate change, as demonstrated by recent climate and pipeline protests.

Martha Hall Findlay, former Liberal MP and executive fellow at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy, says the federal government has blown the environmental file.

“You don’t poke people in the eye when the rest of the world is saying there are significant environmental concerns,” she said.

“I think it’s smart to acknowledge that and address it. Our current federal government has done the opposite in many ways. And, importantly, have been seen to be doing the opposite. There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that it was a factor in Obama’s decision on Keystone.”

With Friends Like These Who Needs Protesters?

What’s become clearer is that such a myopic approach to policymaking has created difficult conditions for the extractive industries.

“The Harper government’s bloody-mindedness on environmental issues has actually done more to bog down large resource projects than anything the environmental movement could have done,” Rick Smith, executive director of the Broadbent Institute, said.

“What it’s done is make First Nations, local communities and environmentalists feel marginalized and angry.”

Keith Stewart of Greenpeace Canada echoed the sentiment, saying complaints are now likely to emerge from beyond the protest crowd: “If the government won’t listen to Canadians about it, they’re soon going to have to listen to our would-be customers.”

While there’s some significant progress occurring on the provincial front on the climate change file, that can’t make up for the lack of federal leadership.

“People outside Canada don’t necessarily understand the nuances of the different levels of governance within the country,” notes Anthony Heyes, University of Ottawa economics professor and Canada Research Chair in Environmental Economics. “Outsiders see it as a country that has a relatively disappointing record in not just greenhouse gas emissions in an absolute way, but also against international commitments..”

Hall Findlay added that if the federal government had followed the lead of the provinces, Keystone XL might have been approved. But at this point, piecemeal climate commitments from the provinces might not be enough.

An associated problem is the fact that Harper bet the economy on the success of the oil and gas sector (Thomas Walkom put it nicely in a piece for the Toronto Star: “Harper has his own unspoken industrial policy. It can be summed up in a word: pipelines.”)

Stanford suggests that such infatuation has come at the cost of other industries — manufacturing, tourism, transportation — due to the high dollar being pegged to an extremely volatile resource.

“You would have needed a government with the foresight and courage to actively push against that in order to protect our environment, obviously, but also our economic diversity and long-run prosperity instead of riding the bandwagon as they did,” he said.

Stanford notes that the employment rate is currently as low as it was in the summer of 2009, the worst moment of the global recession. That’s got to sting for a party that advertises its leader as a trained economist — not an elitist lawyer or under-qualified teacher.

Ultimately, Harper’s mismanagement of the energy and environment file — and most importantly the nexus of those two things — might be more of a gift than a burden for those who want to see progress on climate change.

“In a way, the fact that Stephen Harper has burned any semblance of federal environmental regulation to the ground is an opportunity for Canadians to rebuild something at the federal level that’s new, truly modern and forward thinking,” Smith says.

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He had no idea he was being taped.

So when influential Washington, DC, political consultant Richard Berman talked about strategy and tactics to the oil and gas industry’s Western Energy Alliance in Colorado Springs this past June, he didn’t mince words.  

“This is an endless war,” Berman said.

The secret tape was published in the New York Times a few weeks ago, released by a displeased oil industry executive, on condition of anonymity.

As he urged industry reps to employ tactics like digging up embarrassing tidbits about environmentalists and liberal celebrities, Berman also made one emphatic point:

“People always ask me one question all the time, ‘How do I know that I won't be found out as a supporter of what you're doing?’ We run all of this stuff through non-profit organizations that are insulated from having to disclose donors. There is total anonymity. People don't know who supports us. We've been doing this for 20-something years in this regard.”

The Western Energy Alliance, at whose June meeting Berman laid out his cold-blooded strategy, describes membership as “an investment in the future of the independent oil and gas community in the West.” Its members throughout the U.S. and Canada “share and support our commitment to improve business conditions, expand opportunities and move the industry forward.” 

The only government member of the 480-member Western Energy Alliance is the Canadian Consulate.

Deliberately Misleading the Public

What was Berman, chief executive of Berman & Company, doing talking to the Western Energy Alliance? He was there to raise $3 million from energy executives to pay for an advertising and PR campaign named “Big Green Radicals.”

Berman boasts of having more than 25 “non-profit” front groups that launder money from industry players of all sorts, including the fossil fuel sector, with no way for citizens to find out about this clandestine funding.

“I am religious about not allowing company names to ever get used … And I don't want companies to ever admit that because it does give the other side a way to diminish our message.”

Major corporations secretly financing such a campaign should not worry about offending the general public because “you can either win ugly or lose pretty,” he said.

That strategy sounds familiar back in Canada.

Here’s a deliberately misleading statement that would seem to come straight out of Berman’s manual: “For the fossil fuel industries, the battle with environmental activists is no longer David versus Goliath.”

But this wasn’t a statement from Berman — no, this is the final sentence of an article by Vancouver "researcher" Vivian Krause, who came out of the woodwork in the fall of 2009 when she first started writing a blog called Fair Questions, taking aim at the David Suzuki Foundation’s work on farmed salmon and the support it received from U.S. charitable foundations.

Fun fact: Krause is a nutritionist who worked doing PR for the farmed salmon industry. But it didn’t take long for her so-called “fair questions” to extend to many other environmental issues and organizations.

Instead of searching for a fair answer, Krause settled upon a conspiracy theory. It was to be a story she told over and over again — and it goes like this:

The corporate sector is beleaguered by rich environmental groups bolstered by money from U.S. charitable foundations with a hidden, self-interested agenda — not to do good in the world, or protect the environment, but to attack Canadian competition.

Krause wrote that U.S. foundations were funding work to “demarket” Canadian oil, so the U.S. can control the market. She attacked one of British Columbia's greatest conservation achievements, The Great Bear Rainforest agreement, as part of this conspiracy, calling the forest, "The Great Trade Barrier."

She pursued this theory with blinders on — ignoring all other money in the debate, ignoring all rational explanations for U.S. foundations funding work in Canada and ignoring organizations like Ethical Oil and British Columbians for Prosperity that tout Krause’s arguments but don’t disclose their own sources of funding.

Krause’s work is largely responsible for providing the federal government the ammunition it needed to earmark $13 million for the Canada Revenue Agency to conduct audits of charities’ “political activities.” Diverting the attention of environmental groups to decrease their effectiveness is another strategy out of Big Oil’s dirty PR playbook — as indicated in the Edelman documents outlining a strategy to do just that in the TransCanada Energy East pipeline debate.

Krause has maintained she’s working out of her North Vancouver basement apartment, driven by a sense of injustice to right a wrong. No one was paying her. In fact, she was living on her savings. It seemed an implausible story given the time she put into the work.  

Eventually, Vancouver businessperson and civic advocate Sandy Garossino managed to get Krause to admit on Twitter that more than 90 per cent of her income from 2012 onward has come from resource sector speaking fees.

But this hasn’t stopped her message being picked up verbatim by those who agree with it.

In July 2014, Krause’s work was published in the fossil fuel industry magazine, Alberta Oil, an updated version of the same-old-same-old story.

Her message — now also Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s message — is reinforced by other contributors in the issue of Alberta Oil. There’s Ezra Levant, the abrasive Sun Media host, and author of "Ethical Oil" who asserts: “Some organizations are on the payroll, like the Council of Canadians, that took $1.6 million from U.S. foundations to fight against fracking.”

The editor of Alberta Oil, Sebastian Gault, tells readers that Krause “uncovered an international sponsored scheme [he just about said “conspiracy,” didn’t he?] to stall energy development.”

He adds: “We now have a better understanding of the rise of Big Green and its influence over pseudo-grassroots organizations working against the resource sector.”

"Big Green?" Guess where that term comes from? Straight from Rick Berman, who vowed to wage a campaign he would call “Big Green Radicals."  

Embarrass them publicly, ridicule them, don't worry about playing fair or being honest, the goal is simple: win. That is Berman's message and Krause’s years of attacks on Canadian environmental groups seem to play from his book.

—

Editor’s Note:

We know that upon publishing this article, angry tweets and messages in the form of personal attacks will be aimed at damaging the credibility of DeSmog Canada. 

We know this will happen because this is what Krause and her followers do again and again, straight from the Berman script. This makes many journalists wary of challenging what Krause says and particularly intimidates those she directly attacks.

But DeSmog Canada exists to cut through the spin clouding the debate on important national issues such as natural resource development, the economy and democracy — and we wouldn’t be doing our job if we shied away from this topic. 

Next up: Digging Deeper into Vivian Krause's Disingenuous Anti-Environment Witch Hunt

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Canada will almost certainly not meet its international greenhouse gas emission reduction target by 2020 and doesn’t even have a plan showing how the nation might achieve its climate change goals, according to a blistering new report released Tuesday.

Julie Gelfand, the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, said a climate change audit found current federal measures will have little effect on emissions by 2020, the year Canada committed under the Copenhagen Accord to reduce domestic greenhouse gas emissions 17 per cent below 2005 levels.

Gelfand said in her report that the government has introduced regulations in the transportation and electricity generation sectors.

She noted, however, that regulations in the oil and gas sector — where emissions are growing the fastest — are still not in place eight years after the government first indicated it would regulate this area.

“There is strong evidence that Canada will not meet its international 2020 greenhouse-gas-emission reduction target,” she said. “The federal government does not have an overall plan that maps out how Canada will achieve this target. Canadians have not been given the details about which regulations will be developed, when, nor what greenhouse gas reductions will be expected.”

"Canadians are being grossly misled if they think that this government has even the remotest intention of ever trying to achieve any greenhouse gas targets, let alone join the realm of civilized nations," Liberal environment critic John McKay said in response to the audit.

As DeSmog Canada has previously reported, Canada’s total lack of national climate legislation became international news after a major report highlighted its absence.

Gelfand added the federal government has also not provided the necessary coordination so that all levels of government, working together, can achieve the national target in six years’ time.

The report plays into the growing impression that Canada, often seen as a pariah internationally for its lack of climate change leadership, is too-heavily invested in the fossil fuel industry, especially in Alberta.

The Harper Government, which currently came under fire after Prime Minister Stephen Harper declined to attend the UN Climate Summit in New York City, recently released a public document to highlight Canada’s climate achievements. Critics called the document “Orwellian” for suggesting Canada had made climate progress.

Another audit found that joint Canada-Alberta monitoring projects looking at air, water and biodiversity need to be better integrated to understand the long-term environmental effects of oilsands development, including cumulative impacts.

“Among other questions, the government does not know what Environment Canada’s role will be in oil sands monitoring beyond March 2015,” Gelfand said.

“It has not made clear the rationale for what projects will be subject to environmental assessments, and I am concerned that some significant projects may not be assessed.”

Gelfand’s comments are in line with concerns raised by First Nations in the oilsands’ region, many of which are currently embroiled in legal battles against government and industry for permitting new projects without addressing cumulative impacts that negatively affect treaty rights.

A third audit of the Canadian Arctic revealed that many higher-risk areas are inadequately surveyed and charted with some maps and charts over 40 years old.

“I am concerned that there seems to be no overall vision of what the federal government intends to provide in this vast new frontier, in terms of modern charts, aids to navigation and icebreaker services, given the anticipated increase in vessel traffic.”

Gelfand added this year’s audits show that, despite some initiatives and progress in certain areas, there remain many unanswered questions.

“In many key areas that we looked at, it is not clear how the government intends to address the significant environmental challenges that future growth and development will likely bring about.”

In conclusion, she said Canadians expect the government to prepare for the future and that the difficulty of addressing climate change will only increase as the nation delays.

The environmental footprint of oilsands development is steadily increasing, Gelfand concluded, adding that increased Arctic shipping routes due to melting sea ice will create higher environmental risks.

NDP environment critic Megan Leslie said the results of the audit are “disappointing,” especially given the resource push in the north.

"We have delicate ecosystems in the Arctic. Further to that, there is a really small window right now of when we could actually do that cleanup. We've seen a lot of discussion about drilling in the Arctic and that's one of the major concerns is that if something were to happen, the ice comes pretty quickly,” she said.

“Is there enough time to even clean up the damage that could be done?"

Gelfand also noted an absence of preparatory knowledge. “In each case it is likely that a lack of action today will translate into higher costs tomorrow,” she stated.

Image Credit: Prime Minister Photo Gallery.

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There is a brewing controversy swirling around longtime CBC commentator Rex Murphy and his relationship with Canada's oil industry.

As long time readers of DeSmog know, Murphy has been a vocal supporter of the oilsands industry and a booster of those who attack the scientific realities of climate change. (Here's a compilation of some of the articles we have written on Rex Murphy over the years).

Now questions are going unanswered by the CBC, and avoided altogether by Murphy himself, about a conflict between Murphy potentially being paid to speak at oilsands industry events and his role as a commentator at the CBC.

First to report on the potential conflict was Press Progress, after analysing 25 of Murphy's public speaking engagements.* The outlet found sponsors for Murphy's pro-oil public appearances included the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, Enbridge, TransCanada and Suncor among others. Longtime investigative journalist Andrew Mitrovica wrote on iPolitics that he was taken on a "disturbing odyssey into the CBC’s Byzantine world of subterfuge, duplicity and plain lunacy," as he tried to unravel Murphy's relationship with the CBC and the oilsands industry in Canada. 

The CBC stated that Murphy is not an employee of the public broadcast and instead has, as CBC's Editor in Chief Jennifer McGuire describes it, "a wonderful freelance relationship" with the public broadcaster.

According to McGuire, "as a freelancer, Rex has the ability to do other work. So yes, he writes opinion pieces for The National Post. And yes, he does speaking engagements." The only thing the CBC asks of Murphy is that his commentary "be rooted in fact and experience, not just opinion or knee jerk ideology. But taking a provocative stand is what we pay him to do."

Regardless of CBC's positioning, if it turns out that after all these years, Murphy has been taking money from the oil industry while at the same time attacking those who oppose oilsands development and boosting the industry in his role as a CBC commentator, it will be a big scandal.

For me it is the definition of "fact" that is at the heart of the matter here.

In the case of public policy debates, rather than something like hard science, facts are a very tricky thing.

One person's set of facts on say, whether the Alberta oilsands are good for the long-term prosperity of our country, are to a great extent driven by where that person sits on the issue. It is no coincidence that many of those in favour of further development of the oilsands are apt to quote positive facts and also just so happen to be those profiting the most — whether that be a worker in Fort McMurray making five times his regular wage, an oil company CEO or a Prime Minister who enjoys the political and election campaign support of the fossil fuel industry.

The same holds true for the environmental community, although there is rarely a financial motivation (trust me, I know first hand!). Depending on your worldview, one set of facts will seem more correct than another.

Knowing where someone sits financially and/or ideologically on an issue of public policy is important context when considering the set of facts that person bases their opinion on. It is for this very reason that we have election financing disclosure laws in Canada. It is also why in many scientific fields, researchers must disclose any funding they receive from industry for their work. 

The CBC expects Murphy's commentary to be "rooted in fact" and in turn the public has the same expectation. If it is the case that Murphy is being paid money by the same industry he publicly comments on, then this must be disclosed to the public, which can then be the judge of whether or not Murphy's set of facts sit right with them. 

When it really comes down to it, if Murphy and the CBC believe Murphy's commentary for all these years has been "rooted in fact and experience, not just opinion or knee jerk ideology" then what has Murphy got to hide?

As it stands now, with Murphy ducking the question and the CBC not demanding disclosure from Murphy, his relationship with the CBC is "wonderful" indeed — at least for him and the oil industry he may or may not be taking money from.

*An earlier version of this article stated iPolitics was the first to report on Murhpy's close ties with the oil industry.

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In December 2011, Canada withdrew from the UN's Kyoto Protocol, having exceeded target emissions. Notes drafted by Deputy Minister Serge Dupont of Natural Resources Canada days before the announcement reveal that the Harper government was already planning for a "strong and coordinated" push to support the oil industry through advocacy and reforms.

Mike De Souza writes for Postmedia News, that "The notes, included in an email that Deputy Minister Serge Dupont sent to himself on Dec. 8, 2011, provided highlights of the government's strategy to 'advance a strong and coordinated advocacy and communications plan, with early pre-positioning for legislative and other actions.'"

The email notes state that "Developing access to growing Asia Pacific market for Canada's energy resources, and in particular oil sands, is an urgent matter of national interest."

Dupont wrote that the government should "support" the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway project, which would transport tar sands bitumen from Alberta to the British Columbia coast, as a way to cater to the "growing Asia Pacific market."

He made clear that opening a "corridor" to get Canada's oil to the Asia Pacific was "critical to sustain growth, broaden options for producers, and realize best prices." Though emphasizing the Asian market, Dupont also wrote in favour of TransCanada's proposed Keystone XL pipeline as "a key prospect" to service the US, "our main market."

De Souza writes that the email, "released through access to information legislation, came after Prime Minister Stephen Harper's cabinet decided to withdraw from the international legally binding treaty on climate change — a decision that was announced Dec. 12, 2012 by Environment Minister Peter Kent."

Dupont suggested that the government "pre-position" its arguments to "frame dialogue" in "advance of beginning of public hearings on Gateway, January 10, 2012." This suggestion was followed, De Souza observes, by Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver releasing a letter "prior to the start of the hearings — that accused environmental groups of supporting a 'radical agenda' to 'hijack' Canada's regulatory system with funding from foreign special interests."

Oliver's letter heralded the start of what Dupont's email described as "Proactive policy and program measures [to] support Northern Gateway and future pipelines." De Souza describes the wide ranging changes to Canada's environmental laws, "introduced in about 400 pages of legislation, that were adopted with limited debate in Parliament a few months later."

The changes included the cancellation of "about 3,000 environmental reviews of new projects including hundreds involving pipelines and fossil fuels" and "a federal budget that cut millions of dollars of funding for scientific research examining environmental impacts of industrial activity on air, water and wildlife."

The British Columbia government has announced its opposition to the Northern Gateway proposal, and the US government has yet to make a decision on Keystone XL. But De Souza writes that "other potential proposals are emerging for pipelines linking Alberta's oilsands industry to markets and refineries in eastern Canada and the northeastern United States."

As De Souza mentions, the Harper government has recently spent millions of dollars on advertising Canada's natural resources and promoting its 'green' image as a "world environmental leader," including a new website.

Natural Resources Canada spokeswoman Jacinthe Perras said Dupont's notes were "consistent with creating a system that puts in place timely, efficient, and effective project reviews, while strengthening environmental protection, and enhancing consultations with Aboriginal Peoples," De Souza reports.

Oliver's office has not commented yet on how Dupont's strategy informed the government's support of the oil industry and pipelines, while the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers "declined to comment about its assessment of the federal government's strategy in the context of Dupont's notes."

Image Credit: Kris Krug / Flickr

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This is last installment of a three-part series on greenwashing and the tar sands. Be sure to read Part 1, A Short History of Greenwashing the Tar Sands, and Part 2, Do As I Say, Not As I Do.

Recently, Canadian Oil Sands Chief Executive Officer Marcel Coutu explained to Bloomberg why he and other big shot oil executives have been lobbying U.S. politicians so hard for the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would ferry more than 800,000 barrels of tar sands crude to the Gulf Coast. Coutu had participated in a Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) lobbying junket in February, and another trip is being planned for this month.

The first reason is money. The Keystone XL pipeline is a vital component of the tar sands industry’s plans. Without it, it will be hard for Big Oil to double production of tar sands crude by 2020. With no way to transport the extra crude to markets in the U.S. and beyond, there would be no point in spending all that money to turn bitumen into a crude form of oil. This, Coutu said, has had a chilling effect on investment and share prices.

Canadian Oil Sands shares have risen just two per cent this year, while Cenovus’ have fallen seven percent and Imperial Oil’s are down 6.2 percent. Keystone XL, says Todd Kepler, a Calgary-based oil and gas analyst at Cormark Securities, would increase share prices for oil producers by as much as 20 per cent.

That's a big deal worth millions of dollars.

The second reason is, apparently, a concern for the truth. “In large part, we go [on endless lobbying trips] to get the story straight,” Coutu told Bloomberg. “The problem is, environmentalists are not held to the same standard of proof as public companies like us are.”

This is an interesting take on the search for truth in the battle over the future of the Keystone XL pipeline, especially since it comes from a leader in an industry long criticised for its lack of connection to or concern for the truth. To see whether Couto's claim has any merit, let’s look at the way the oil industry talks about the costs and benefits of the Keystone XL pipeline, and tar sands development in general, to see how high their standards of proof really are.

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The story Couto and his colleagues in the oil industry like to tell (with the help of Canadian politicians) about Keystone XL is one of few risks and enormous rewards. Keystone XL, they claim, will not increase greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but it will enhance U.S. energy security and create as many as 20,000 jobs.

Besides, they argue, if U.S. President Obama doesn’t give TransCanada the presidential permit it needs to begin construction, they’ll find other ways of getting the oil to the Gulf Coast by other means. With other pipeline proposals stalled in Canada and the U.S., they point largely to rail as industry’s Plan B to transport tar sands crude to refineries in Oklahoma and Texas.

The greenhouse gas myth is easy to debunk. While the U.S. State Department’s draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) does conclude that Keystone XL will not increase GHG emissions, this finding already has been challenged by an agency that knows better – the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In its comments on the draft SEIS, the EPA found the SEIS deficient, in large part because Keystone XL would contribute 19 megatonnes of GHGs to the atmosphere annually.

This is largely because turning bitumen into tar sands crude is three to four times more greenhouse gas intensive than conventional crude. So much for higher standards of proof.

The EPA also weighed in on the claim that rail could deliver the planned increase in tar sands production southward, which Coutu’s comments indicate potential investors already view as spurious.

“The discussion in the DSEIS regarding energy markets, while informative, is not based on an updated energy-economic modeling effort. The DSEIS includes a discussion of rail logistics and the potential growth of rail as a transport option, however we recommend that the Final EIS provide a more careful review of the market analysis and rail transport options. … recognizing the potential for much higher per barrel rail shipment costs than presented in the DSEIS. This analysis should consider how the level and pace of oil sands crude production might be affected by higher transportation costs and the potential for congestion impacts to slow rail transport of crude.”

The reality is that rail can't replace pipelines—at least not without a massive, expensive and time-consuming investment in new rail infrastructure. In spite of rapid growth over the last few years, Canada’s National Energy Board estimates that only 47,000 barrels per day of oil was exported by rail from Canada to the US in 2012, which is less than six per cent of the capacity of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline and less than one per cent of the production capacity of all tar sands projects that have been approved or under regulatory review.

There is no way rail can replace Keystone XL, and Coutu’s comments indicate the oil industry already knows this. But that doesn’t stop tar sands companies from claiming otherwise in the public square.

As for energy security and jobs, these claims have been widely debunked, too. According to the U.S. Department of Energy’s original assessment in 2011, Keystone XL would divert Canadian oil from the U.S. Midwest to the Gulf Coast, where most of it would be refined and exported, not retained in the U.S. In return, the Midwest would get the gift of higher gasoline prices, because the price of oil would increase.

In fact, because the United States is awash in tight oil, and with energy consumption declining, there is little need for more of Canada’s dirty oil or the Keystone XL pipeline.

TranCanada, meanwhile, claims that Keystone XL will create 20,000 jobs, as well as more than 100,000 “indirect” jobs. The reality is somewhat different, as you might have guessed by now. According to the U.S. State Department, Keystone XL will create no more than 6,000 temporary jobs and—wait for it—just 20 permanent jobs.

Meanwhile, the University of Nebraska predicts that Keystone XL will experience 91 major spills over the 50-year lifetime of the pipeline.

TransCanada has experienced major problems with its first Keystone pipeline, which has already leaked 14 times in its first year of operation along the U.S. section alone.

Conclusion? Don’t believe anyone whose paycheck depends on what version of the truth comes out of his mouth. Investors, like CEOs, aren’t all that concerned with accurate and appropriately contextualized information. All they care about, as Coutu makes abundantly clear, is getting as much oil to the highest bidder as quickly as possible, the truth be damned.

Image Credit: Kris Krug via flickr

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.

Oil industry lobbyists in Canada have taken the country by the reins. At least, that's the implication of the Polaris Institute's new report released today. The report, "Big Oil's Oily Grasp – The Making of Canada as a Petro-State and How Oil Money is Corrupting Canadian Politics," (pdf) documents 2,733 meetings held between the oil industry and federal government officials since 2008. That figure outstrips meetings with environmental organizations by a whopping 463 percent. 

The Conservative government has never shied away from defending Canada’s oil and gas sector – whether branding environmental critics as “radicals” for their anti-oil-sands advocacy, lobbying European and U.S. governments to defeat punitive rules and ensure access to markets, or overhauling legislation to provide changes to environmental review processes that were supported by industry.

One way of quantifying the huge gap between the oil and ENGO [environmental non-governmental organization] lobby is to compare the lobby records of one of the largest environmental coalitions in Canada, the Climate Action Network (CAN), with that of CAPP. Over the past four years, CAN has only logged six communications with DPOHs [designated public office holders] while CAPP logged 536. The financial realities of these two organizations are in a different league with CAPP’s membership including the richest companies in the world. It is also clear based on registry communication data that the level of influence and access to politicians and policy makers is also quite asymmetrical and largely favors CAPP.

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