By Charles Mandel. This article originally appeared on the National Observer.

Ecojustice, on behalf of a group of prominent Canadians, filed a complaint Thursday with the federal Competition Bureau, asking it to investigate false and misleading representations made by climate change denier groups.

In their application to the Commissioner of Competition, the group called for “a thorough rigorous inquiry of the denier groups and their climate science misrepresentations.”

The group is also pressing for the commission to refer their application to the Attorney-General of Canada for criminal charges against the denier groups.

Ecojustice filed the complaint of behalf of Stephen Lewis, the former Canadian Ambassador to the UN and chair of the 1988 World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere; Tzeporah Berman, author and adjunct professor at York University; and Thomas Duck, an atmospheric scientist at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

Other complainants are David Schindler, the Killam Memorial professor of ecology at the University of Alberta, and Danny Harvey, an University of Toronto professor and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change lead author.

The complaint cites The Friends of Science, The International Climate Science Coalition and the Heartland Institute for misleading billboard advertisements, website representations and a poster made available as a free download on a website.

“These groups attempt to discredit the established scientific consensus that global warming and climate change are real and caused by human activity,” Duck said in a statement. “The reality, causes and consequences of climate change are well understood.”

Canada’s Competition Act prohibits the making of materially false or misleading representations for the purpose of promoting any business interest such as fossil fuel development.

In its application, Ecojustice states that it believes the case should be referred to the Attorney General as a criminal matter. Potential prosecution can take place if it can be demonstrated that there’s clear and compelling evidence that accused knowingly or recklessly made false or misleading representations to the public.

The competition bureau must also be satisfied that criminal prosecution would be in the public interest.

The application notes that two Friends of Science billboards were the subject of 96 complaints to Advertising Standards Canada (ASC) during their display in Montreal in 2014. The council reviewed the billboard ads against the Canadian Code of Advertising Standards and determined they were false and misleading advertising.

The Friends of Science appealed the ruling, but it was upheld. Just months after the decision, the Friends of Science put up a new video billboard making climate science misrepresentations in Montreal and in November 2015 put up more billboards in Edmonton and Calgary.

The application alleges that the Friends of Science’s continued display of climate science misrepresentations after numerous consumer complaints and a former censure by the ASC is clear and compelling evidence that the group knowingly or recklessly made such misrepresentations.

“When combined with the overwhelming public importance of the context in which the climate science misrepresentations are made — including the effect of climate change on the Canadian economy, and the negative effects of climate science misrepresentations on competition in key markets for stimulating the transition to a low carbon economy in Canada — we believe the Commissioner’s inquiry should proceed on the criminal track,” the application states.

Ecojustice and the individuals it represents allege that the climate change denier groups misrepresent climate change science to promote their own business interests and those of their anonymous funders.

“While the denier groups do not publically disclose the identities of their funds, available public information suggests their funding comes at least in part from individuals and corporations with business interests in the production and use of fossil fuels,” the application to the Competition Bureau alleges.

The application states that Talisman Energy Inc., a Calgary-based oil and gas exploration and production company, donated $175,000 to Friends of Science in 2004 to fund the production of a specific video and other activities.

Mike De Souza, an environmental journalist then with the Ottawa Citizen, wrote in 2012 how the energy company, contributed to a pair of trust accounts at the University of Calgary in 2004 to produce a video and engage in public relations, advertising and lobbying activities against the Kyoto Protocol and government measures to restrict fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

The accounts were formed at the request of Friends of Science, whom de Souza described as “retired oil industry workers and academics who oppose the Kyoto Protocol and reject the validity of peer-reviewed science on the causes of climate change observed in recent decades.”

In an earlier submission to Alberta’s Privacy and Information Commissioner, Talisman said that an university audit turned up nothing to suggest that the school was aware of its own funds “being used for political purposes,” De Souza reported.

A Talisman spokesperson told De Souza that “the donation was a decision made by the company’s former president, who had ‘different views on climate change science.’

“Today, Talisman’s position is quite different and Talisman does believe that [greenhouse gas emissions] pose a significant risk to the industry,” the spokesperson said.

In its application, Ecojustice states that climate science misrepresentations are inherently harmful to the proper functioning of markets in Canada. “The confusion they sow makes low-carbon technologies less competitive and distorts capital investment toward high-carbon industries, risking a carbon bubble.”

The Competition Act gives the commissioner investigatory powers to examine witnesses and order the production of documents, such as lists of donors, to advance an inquiry. If the information gathered by the commissioner shows the act has been violated, the matter may be referred to the Attorney General of Canada for prosecution or civil proceedings before the courts.

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As cuts to federal science budgets continue, former government scientists and academics who’ve lost their funding say the cuts have upended their careers, compromised knowledge about Canada’s environment and undercut the development of the next generation of scientists.

The cuts were cast into the national spotlight earlier this year when CBC’s Fifth Estate ran an episode called Silence of the Labs.  

As the list of affected departments grows, DeSmog Canada has reached out to former government and university scientists to hear their stories.

Mercury and Climate Unwatched?

Britt Hall, a biogeochemist at the University of Regina, would travel every summer to the Experimental Lakes Area (ELA), a freshwater research institute, to study the way chemicals move in the environment. [view:in_this_series=block_1]

There, she examined mercury, a neurotoxin, found in the environment naturally, but predominantly from burning coal for electricity.

Thomas Duck, a climate scientist at Dalhousie University, spent 18 years travelling to a remote weather station on Ellesmere Island in the Arctic to do climate science at the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory in Eureka, Nunavut.

Both Duck and Hall worked at world-renowned research institutes that faced elimination in 2012 — and then were saved, but their careers have by no means returned to normal.

The ups and downs of the Experimental Lakes Area’s 58 lakes in northwest Ontario have been well recorded in the media. When the federal government chopped the area’s $2-million annual funding in May 2012, world-renowned scientists decried the cuts.

All seemed lost until the Ontario and Manitoba governments stepped in to support the International Institute for Sustainable Development as the new manager.

For seven years, Hall and other scientists had been feeding a lake, a forest and a wetland with mercury at the Experimental Lakes Area. They were studying how long it takes mercury to leave fish when the doors were shut.

Funding for Duck’s polar lab dried up after the Harper government cut off money to the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, a fund for climate science created by the Chretien government.

Running on reserves until early 2012, the lab was forced to close for part of the year when it couldn’t secure $1.5 million in annual funding. Then, a year and a bit later, the government stepped in with $1-million-a-year for five years.

Prior to the doors closing, Duck was working on “cutting edge” research into how the atmosphere and permafrost were interacting. The Arctic’s infrastructure — roads, buildings and bridges — is built on the permafrost and if it melts “we have real problems,” Duck says.

A recent survey of Arctic dwellers found residents want research to be focused on issues relevant to their daily lives. 

Just because the Experimental Lakes Area and the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory were saved doesn’t mean Hall and Duck’s return is certain, however.

“I am hoping to get out there [the ELA], so we will see if I can scrape together a small amount of money to go,” says Hall, who says she lost her funding as a result of a fundamental reordering of the way science is funded in Canada.

Duck, meanwhile, says funding was restored — 40 per cent lower than the original amount — but the closure kneecapped his research and gutted his capacity to carry on research into the impact of climate change on the permafrost.

“It took the ability to even propose these kinds of ideas out of our hands — the loss of capacity meant we could no longer make a credible case for it,” he says.

Disappearing Dollars

For environmental scientists, the main source of funding for research has traditionally been the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Hall says.

Changes to the council over the last few years cut back money for discovery grants for blue-sky science and shifted internal money to research with an industry partner. These changes resulted in Hall losing her discovery grant, she said.

She contacted three industries that release mercury, but to no avail.

“I can’t solve a problem for industry,” Hall says. “I can help study the release of the mercury, but I can’t stop their mercury release — I am not an engineer.”

Disappearing support for research that doesn’t directly benefit industry was a story we also heard from former federal forestry scientist Philp Burton. He told DeSmog Canada in Part 1 of our Cuts to Science series that this is the first time in his 30-year career he has run out of ideas on where to look for research dollars.

In addition to the changes at the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, “there are no other programs specifically related to forestry as there had been in the past,” Burton said.

Lost Capacity

Duck’s team at Eureka helped build a $1.2-million advanced laser radar called lidar, but it’s currently turned off and “its future remains somewhat in doubt,” Duck says.

When the polar lab closed, Duck went from working with 10 people — undergraduate and graduate students, research associates, and a senior scientist — to having one graduate student. All of the instrument operators, who were highly skilled at operating 25 different complex instruments in the hostile Arctic environment, were laid-off, Duck says.

“It was a loss of exceptional people…it also breaks the chain in training graduate students,” Duck added.

The two-year break halted the cycle of senior graduate students passing their knowledge onto junior graduates, resulting in huge loss of “institutional knowledge and capabilities.”

Hall echoes the sentiment. Losing federal funding halted her research and dropped the number of students working under her from around five to one (who is only there because he gets his salary from someone else), she said.

“That engine of training scientists, training students to be scientists, and producing new knowledge basically stopped,” Hall says. “I have seen it throughout my entire department.”

If more funding for research does not become available, Hall says she would take on more teaching responsibilities, while Duck is contemplating changing his research focus after such a major setback.

“This was a life-changing event,” Duck says.

Photo: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

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