Documents released on Monday reveal that B.C.’s climate plan under the previous Liberal government was drafted by the oil and gas industry in a Calgary boardroom, just as the province’s new NDP government moves to ban corporate and union donations to B.C. political parties.

The documents speak to long-standing concerns over the influence of political donations in B.C.’s political process. B.C. has long been considered the ‘wild west’ of political cash for placing no limits on corporate, union or foreign donations.

“I think this is deeply corrosive to our democracy and it encourages cynicism about politics,” Max Cameron, political science professor and director of the Study of Democratic Institutions at the University of British Columbia, told DeSmog Canada.

The documents, released to Shannon Daub of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives as part of her research with the Corporate Mapping Project, reveal that while the B.C. government under former premier Christy Clark hired a celebrated Climate Leadership Team and conducted public consultations, a parallel industry consultation process occurred behind closed doors in a boardroom of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

The BC Liberals have raked in cash from the fossil fuel industry, including more than $3.7 million from just the top 10 industry donors between 2008 and 2015.

Cameron said the documents, which include slides outlining industry working groups tasked with addressing carbon pricing and methane emissions, provide a much-needed glimpse into what exactly industry is paying for when making large donations to political parties.

“Reading these documents gives us some real insight into how it is that these kinds of donations can buy not just access to government but access to actually writing policy,” he said.

Clark’s Secret Consultations with Oil and Gas Donors Revealed As BC Introduces Big Money Ban #bcpoli @CCPA_BC https://t.co/nFjm9W8Vqx

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) September 18, 2017

Climate Leadership Team Unaware of Parallel Industry Consultations

B.C. handpicked a blue-ribbon team of 17 academic, business, environmental and First Nations stakeholders to form the Climate Leadership Team. That team made 32 official recommendations to the B.C. government, none of which were implemented in the province’s eventual Climate Action Plan.

Merran Smith, executive director of Clean Energy Canada, was a member of the team and said the fact that not a single recommendation was adopted “really says it all.”

Christy Clark’s government “allowed the oil and gas sector to write the climate plan for B.C. that is mostly status quo and has very little impact on B.C.’s growing climate pollution,” Smith told DeSmog Canada.

She added once the team made its recommendations to the government, their involvement in the crafting of the Climate Action Plan tapered off quickly.

“We had very few meetings with the B.C. government once the recommendations were created. It was clear that they actually had very little interest in doing anything with recommendations.”

Meanwhile, Christy Clark pointed to the recommendations at the UN Climate Summit in Paris as evidence of B.C.’s climate leadership.

Tzeporah Berman, a prominent environmental advocate in B.C. and member of the Climate Leadership Team said she had no idea B.C. was conducting parallel consultations with industry.

“I was shocked when I saw these documents,” Berman told DeSmog Canada.

“Consultation should be a transparent process and should be done with multiple stakeholders. These were secret meetings in Calgary where the oil and gas industry was rewriting B.C. policy. That's not consultation, it's corruption.”

Berman said the documents reveal an “unacceptable level of access and influence with the Liberal government.”

“They also help those of us from the leadership team understand how the climate plan that the Liberals put together really had no similarity to what the Liberals’ own climate team recommended,” she said.

The team worked hard for months to deliver a plan within a short timeframe and offered to meet with stakeholders to “problem solve any concerns” if that would help B.C. “ensure implementation” of the recommendations, Berman said.

But that offer was never taken up.

“From our end it was a bizarre process,” Berman said.

Fossil Fuel Companies Regularly ‘Craft’ Climate Plans

Laurie Adkin, professor of political science at the University of Alberta, said when it comes to government consultations with corporations, “secrecy is routine” and “transparency is the exception.”

“Even when governments reveal that they have met with representatives of private corporations, reporting on these meetings typically does not reveal which corporate representatives were in the room, or what their positions were,” Adkin told DeSmog Canada.

Adkin, who is a member of the Corporate Mapping Project, specializes in documenting corporate influence in politics and on university campuses.

Government consultation with industry is the status quo, Adkin said, while public consultation is meant to merely survey public opinion and “give the appearance that government has created meaningful opportunities for citizen input into policy decisions.”

“I do not believe that any climate change plan has been written, to date, in which the major fossil fuel corporations have not ‘directly crafted’ the plan,” Adkin said.

Adkin and Cameron agree the documents are reflective of “institutional corruption.”

“Corruption isn’t just quid pro quo of privately benefitting from your public office, it’s also a corruption of the institution, when the public purpose of the institution is undermined by private actors in a way that diminishes our trust in those institutions,” Cameron said.

“The goal of public policy is to serve the public’s interest, not to serve particular private interests.”

Leadership Team Hopeful Under New NDP Government

Berman said the oil and gas industry has too much political influence in Canada, but said she is hopeful the new B.C. government will “design policy to benefit the people and not just polluters.”

“I was very glad to see the carbon tax increase in the last budget,” Berman said.

“I think the next step is removing all the subsidies that the Liberal government handed out to the gas industry. We shouldn't be spending taxpayers dollars to help the fossil fuel industry expand in the climate era”

Berman said she also looks forward to the new government moving forward on the zero emissions vehicles targets and strengthening the clean fuel standard.

Smith said she is pleased the Climate Leadership Team had the opportunity to craft the recommendations when it did.

“The silver lining is that we still have a good, solid set of climate action recommendations sitting there, and we now have a Premier and government who is interested in taking climate action and building a clean growth economy for the twenty-first century.”

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

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By Shannon Daub & Zoë Yunker.

Newly uncovered documents obtained through Freedom of Information requests reveal the cozy relationship between the fossil fuel industry and the last B.C. government went even further than suspected — all the way to inviting industry to directly craft the province’s climate “leadership” plan.

Let’s rewind for a second: back in the spring of 2015, then-premier Christy Clark announced the provincial government would create a new climate plan.

A 17-member climate leadership team was appointed and tasked with developing recommendations to meet B.C.’s greenhouse gas reduction targets. The government released the team’s recommendations in the fall of 2015 — allowing then-Premier Christy Clark head off to Paris for the December 2015 UN climate talks cloaked in the mantle of climate “leadership,” after four years of near-total inaction by her government.

That’s where things got interesting.

Documents obtained via Freedom of Information legislation indicate that while the Paris talks were underway, the government launched a closed-door three month-long process to work jointly with the oil and gas industry to revise and re-write the climate leadership team recommendations.

The process entailed five rounds of meetings over three months with all the key corporate players, from oil and gas producers to distributors. It was divided into working groups on the carbon tax; methane and fugitive emissions (i.e., from natural gas production, a significant source of B.C.’s greenhouse emissions); and electrification (i.e., the provision of cheap electricity to natural gas extraction sites and LNG plants in order to make gas production less GHG-intensive).

Notably, most of these B.C. government-organized meetings took place not in B.C., but in Calgary — specifically in the boardroom of the most powerful fossil fuel lobby group in the country, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP).

The documents include a power point deck dated January 2016 that outlines the process for the “Climate Leadership Team Recommendations – Consultation with Oil and Gas Industry.”

The document is from the Ministry of Natural Gas Development, which led the “consultation”— not the Climate Action Secretariat, which coordinated the Climate Leadership Team (and, as far as the public knew, was the lead government agency working on the plan). The documents released also include agendas from one round of working group meetings on January 13, 2016, along with the attendee lists for those meetings.

These lists show that senior officials from the Ministry of Natural Gas Development, the Climate Action Secretariat and BC Hydro attended the January 13 meetings in person. We do not yet have access to the daily calendars for several other senior officials who we believe may also have been present.

Also in attendance were over two dozen representatives from at least 16 oil and gas corporations and industry groups, including the B.C. LNG Alliance (which also had a seat on the official Climate Leadership Team), Canadian Natural Resources Limited, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Encana, Imperial Oil, Nexen/CNOOC, Progress Energy (wholly owned subsidiary of Malaysian state-owned Petronas), Shell Canada, Suncor, Teck, Woodfibre Energy, CAPP and others.

Recall that when the climate leadership plan was released in the summer of 2016 it largely ignored the leadership team’s 32 recommendations, in what was dubbed by some as a “climate non-plan.”

Meet the Real Climate “Leadership” Team: Big Oil and Gas Corporations

Most troubling of all is that this was much more than a “consultation” process.

The documents obtained make it clear that in fact the process constituted an invitation to the country’s most powerful oil and gas companies to shape both the substance and language of B.C.’s next climate plan.

For example, the working groups on methane emissions and electrification were each asked to “refine language in CLT recommendation” and to “add detail and process direction” regarding timing and whether policy measures would be voluntary or regulatory. The working group on the carbon tax was asked to “ensure consistency with other jurisdictions” and to “determine ‘the art of the possible’ (how much and how fast).”

The working groups were asked to come together to “work on offsets.” The timeline for the working groups also include the action item “finalize language” for the “CLP Framework” (ie, Climate Leadership Plan Framework).

Our FOI request asked for minutes and/or summaries of the meetings and industry consultation process, but none were released to us. Pages 19 to 38 of the relevant records were withheld on the grounds they constitute advice or recommendations to a public body or minister (S. 13) and/or that they would be harmful to the business interests of a third party (S. 21).

Perhaps these missing pages are the minutes and summaries. Or perhaps they are something else. We have asked the Information and Privacy Commissioner to review the government’s decision to withhold these records.

It should be noted that it took two FOI attempts to even receive this much information. In July 2016, we submitted identical requests to the Ministry of Environment/Climate Action Secretariat and the Ministry of Natural Gas Development for documents relating to any meetings or other communication between the fossil fuel industry and senior officials in relation to a wide range of energy and climate policy matters starting in January 2016.

The Ministry of Natural Gas Development withheld all documents having to do with the industry engagement process and Calgary meetings.

The Ministry of Environment released the agendas for the January 13 working group meetings (just the agendas, no other contextual information). It was only through a follow-up request to the Ministry of Natural Gas Development (now part of the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources) that we obtained the fuller set of documents reviewed here. These should all have been released in response to our initial request, along with material from the other rounds of working group meetings (and who knows what else).

A Stunning Example of Institutional Corruption

In sum, the B.C. government carried out secret meetings in another province with an industry that is a top contributor to the BC Liberal Party to shape policy that ought to constrain that very industry — as any meaningful climate policy must do in relation to the fossil fuel sector.

Ironically, none of these meetings “count” as lobbying under B.C.’s current Lobbyist Registration Act, which doesn’t require meetings or communication invited by public officials to be reported by lobbyists. Meanwhile, no other sector — environmental organizations, First Nations, etc. — could even dream of this kind of access.

BC’s Last #Climate 'Leadership' Plan Was Written in Big Oil’s Boardroom (Literally) https://t.co/lUKX67Hsy9 #bcpoli @CCPA_BC @bcliberals

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) September 18, 2017

This is more than a case of ideological alignment between a corporate-friendly party and its corporate donors. It is a profound blurring of the lines between government and industry, who set out to make policy together behind closed doors, while what can only now be characterized as a pretend consultation process was acted out publicly.

This blurring of the lines is an example of what ethicists refer to as “institutional corruption:” a “systemic and strategic influence that undermines the institution’s effectiveness by diverting it from its purpose or weakening its ability to achieve its purpose, including…weakening either the public’s trust in that institution or the institution’s inherent trustworthiness.”

The whole charade also represents an abuse of the climate leadership team’s time and a mockery of B.C.’s claims to leadership during the Paris climate talks, not to mention a tremendous waste of public resources.

How much did the province spend on the climate leadership team process — convening the 17-member team for meetings, carrying out extensive climate modeling to support their deliberations (services that were contracted from the private firm Navius, no doubt at significant expense) and public consultation activities? How many thousands of hours of staff time were spent by ministry personnel to support it all?

B.C.’s new government has committed to more ambitious climate policies than what the previous Liberal government outlined in its non-plan last year. But with the fossil fuel industry accustomed to putting pen to paper on policy and regulation, a great deal of political will is required to move forward. And that ban on corporate donations to political parties? It can’t come soon enough.

   —

Shannon Daub is Associate Director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives B.C. Office, and co-director of the Corporate Mapping Project. Zoe Yunker is Zoë is a graduate student in the Sociology Department at the University of Victoria and a research assistant with the Corporate Mapping Project.

This report is published as part of the Corporate Mapping Project, a research and public engagement initiative investigating the power of the fossil fuel industry. The CMP is jointly led by the University of Victoria, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ B.C. and Saskatchewan offices, and the Parkland Institute. In March, the project reported on the millions of dollars donated by the fossil fuel industry in recent years to B.C. political parties.  This research is supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

DeSmog Canada is a community partner of the Corporate Mapping Project.

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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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We’ve all seen a chart like it: logos of corporations connected by thin lines to other logos, linking dozens of subsidiaries to spin-offs of even larger companies.

But such diagrams — whether they attempt to illustrate the concentration of media ownership or linking music record companies to arms manufacturers — rarely involve Canada or the fossil fuel companies that dominate lobbying and other political efforts.

The Corporate Mapping Project, co-directed by Shannon Daub of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and William Carroll of the University of Victoria, aims to remedy that.

“We need to have a conversation about how these forms of concentrated power can be problematic for democratic processes in terms of decision-making and the citizenry collectively determining its future,” says Carroll, sociology professor at the University of Victoria.

“To the extent that you have very strong concentrations of corporate power in key sectors of the economy, it limits the boundaries of permissible discourse: what can be said, what can be discussed openly.”

Project Maps 238 Fossil Fuel Companies in Canada

The Corporate Mapping Project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, just concluded the first of its six years.

In that time, the project analyzed more than $50 million in corporate assets and “mapped” 238 Canadian corporations centred in the fossil fuel sector (which linked out to a total of 1,258 total corporations based in Canada and abroad).

Going far beyond simply connecting, say, Suncor and Syncrude, the project examines companies at the level of governance, tracking what Carroll dubs the “elite networks” of corporate executives and directors.

The project features another three strands that will be explored over the course of the next half-decade.

One will examine the reach of corporate influence into civil and political society, impacting and helping shape entities like think tanks, foundations, industry groups, lobby groups, universities and research institutes. A subsect of that will explore how corporations push certain discourses via advertising, corporate social responsibility reports and press releases.

Another will look at commodity chains, how power is organized within chains of production and the “flashpoints” of protest such as anti-Northern Gateway blockades and less place-specific movements such as fossil fuel divestment campaigns.

Corporate Connections to be Posted on Wiki Community

Rounding out the quartet will be the actual collection and transmitting of the learnings.

Carroll says an online interactive tool will be developed with a wiki community to keep it up to date, similar to how data is presented by the Public Accountability Initiative (a U.S. nonprofit that research connections between corporations and government).

There are a dozen or so co-investigators that form the core team for the Corporate Mapping Project. Partners include Unifor, the University of Alberta, Simon Fraser University, the University of Lethbridge and the University of Regina.

It’s a sizable project. As Carroll notes, such resources are much needed given the changing landscape of new provincial and federal governments, the collapse in the global price of oil and the recent Paris climate change agreement.

Then there’s the fierce debate over TransCanada’s Energy East pipeline, pitting Alberta’s NDP government against Indigenous communities, climate activists and the provinces of Québec and Ontario.

TransCanada used ‘Bullying’ and ‘Attempts to Buy People Out’

It’s a situation that well represents why the Corporate Mapping Project is so needed, and why its organizers are bringing Éric Pineault — sociology professor at Université du Québec à Montréal and author of the recently released "The Energy East Trap" — to Vancouver and Victoria for a series of free lectures titled “Extreme Oil: Corporate Power, Tar Sands Expansion, and the Capitalist Pressure to Extract.”

Pineault says TransCanada started its pitch for Energy East to local residents with “bullying and trying buy people out.”

Documents leaked to Greenpeace show TransCanada hired public relations giant Edelman to concoct a fake grassroots advocacy campaign designed to persuade the public to support Energy East. The scandal led TransCanada and Edelman to eventually part ways.

Since the federal Liberal government was elected, the company has entered a “seduction phase,” according to Pineault. But the underlying intentions of the company — which also owns the proposed Keystone XL pipeline — is the same: to increase shareholder value.

Such an ownership structure means the “progressive extractivism” agenda that suggests increased hydrocarbon production is required to fund the transition to a “greener economy” is almost doomed to fail.

“It ties you in and can co-opt…your transition.” He added, “I think [Alberta’s] Notley government is going in that direction.”

Private Ownership Makes Transition to Renewables Far More Difficult

Pineault argues that pipelines such as Energy East will likely be around for many decades and suck up investment, research efforts and competent workers that could otherwise be directed to renewable projects. In addition, efficiencies may be developed to “green” hydrocarbon production instead of cutting down on emissions from heating and transportation.

“If it was a publically controlled sector, then you could plan this phase-in, phase-out approach,” he says. “You can’t do that with private capital: they consider they’re sitting on assets that are worth billions and the value of these assets must be realized on a 60- or 70-year cycle.”

“They’re going to do everything they can to keep that cycle going as long as they can.”

Which is why it seems fairly important to know who’s calling the shots, what kind of tactics are being deployed and what entities are being potentially harnessed to promote a company’s agenda.

That’s where the Corporate Mapping Project comes in. After all, it’s pretty difficult to break those thin lines if you don’t even know they exist.

Tickets to Pineault’s free lectures are available online. RSVP details below:

Vancouver:

Wednesday May 18, 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM

SFU Harbour Centre (Hastings & Seymour)

Free but you need a ticket: http://www.ccpabc.ca/extreme_oil_van

Victoria:

Friday May 20, 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM

Legacy Gallery (630 Yates St)

Free but you need a ticket: http://www.ccpabc.ca/extreme_oil_victoria

Image: Suncor/Facebook

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