Senior administrators at the University of Calgary suppressed academic freedom and failed to address glaring conflicts of interest while attempting to establish an Enbridge-funded research centre, according to a report commissioned by the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) that was released Wednesday.

The report — co-authored by Alison Hearn of the University of Western Ontario and Gus Van Harten of York University — is the result of almost two years of investigation, and starkly contradicts the findings of the university’s own internal review of the situation.

The Canadian Association of University Teachers is a nationwide federation of associations representing 70,000 post-secondary workers.

“Academic staff and professors involved at the centre reached out to senior administrators and said ‘we’re concerned about Enbridge’s influence over the centre, we don’t think we should be a PR firm for Enbridge,’” said David Robinson, executive director of CAUT, in an interview with DeSmog Canada.

“Those concerns were rebuffed. That’s a very serious matter that strikes at the heart of the academic credibility and integrity of work at the University of Calgary.”

Here are five key takeaways from the report.

1) University president Elizabeth Cannon was in a stunning conflict of interest

In 2011 and 2012, the University of Calgary fervently worked to launch the Enbridge Centre for Corporate Sustainability within the university’s renown Haskayne School of Business.

A small problem: the University of Calgary’s president, Elizabeth Cannon, was a board member of Enbridge Income Fund Holdings Board, for which she received an annual remuneration of $130,500 per year (that’s in addition to the $454,000 in salary that she made in 2013). At the end of 2014, Cannon owned over $800,000 of shares in the income fund.

Yet she failed to recuse herself from any of the negotiations for the sponsorship deal with Enbridge.

In fact, she made several direct interventions in the process, including an email in August 2012 to the dean of Haskayne School of Business stating that Enbridge is “not seeing your leadership on this file and are feeling that once the funding was committed, the interest from you was lost. This is not good for you or the university. I want to have a good relationship with Enbridge given that Al Monaco is incoming CEO and our grad (and I am on one of their Boards!).”

The CAUT report concluded this represented a “clear appearance of a conflict of interest” that “should have been readily apparent to anyone who knew of the circumstances.”

Its advice? Quite obvious, really: she shouldn’t have occupied a paid position on an external corporate board as U of C president, or should have recused herself from all involvements with Enbridge.

2) Former Enbridge Centre director Joe Arvai had his academic freedom seriously compromised by the university

Joe Arvai, a former Michigan State University professor and member of Barack Obama’s energy advisory group during the 2008 campaign, was hired on as director of the proposed centre.

Almost immediately, he started resisting the company’s push to create what he called a “PR machine for themselves.” His concerns included Enbridge’s request for the institute to partner with Central Michigan University — which was geographically close to where the catastrophic Kalamazoo River oil spill happened in 2010 and served as an opportunity for the company to try to rehabilitate its reputation in the area.

In addition, he became concerned that the centre’s name and terms would “strip away my credibility when it comes to the kind of research and policy work I do best.”

He eventually left the directorship after Enbridge strongly opposed his dual appointment to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency science advisory body. Furthermore, he told the CAUT committee that he was actually removed from his position only a week after he indicated his opposition to Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline when asked by the company’s public relations firm.

The report held nothing back on this front.

“This mishandling appears to have been due to a desire on the part of senior U of C leadership to please a significant donor,” the authors wrote. “On repeated occasions, one or more University officials who should have been affirming and defending Arvai’s academic freedom instead undermined it.”

3) The university failed to credibly maintain any independence from Enbridge

The agreement was that Enbridge would provide $2.25 million over ten years to help fund the research institute, which would focus on “corporate sustainability and triple bottom line decision-making.”

In return for a mere $225,000 a year, the company pushed to receive naming rights, influence over who funding awards were given to, ability to push for partner institutions such as Central Michigan University and “customized opportunities to meet with researchers pursuing projects of interest.”

The university happily granted them all their wishes.

That led to business professor Harrie Vredenburg writing an email in August 2011 to Haskayne School dean Leonard Waverman, suggesting the situation “smacks of us being apologists for the fossil fuel industry rather than independent scholars and teachers doing work in a broadly defined area.”

The report concluded that “there appears to have been a significant failure of collegial governance, accountability and oversight in the establishment of the [Enbridge Centre for Corporate Sustainability].”

Robinson of CAUT said in an interview with DeSmog Canada: “It doesn’t surprise me at all that companies want to try to influence university research to their advantage. What does surprise me, and frankly shocks me, is when universities give into those demands so easily.”

4) The university has no serious interest in admitting its mistakes

In response to the criticism following the explosive investigation in late 2015 by CBC News into the situation, the university’s board of governors launched a “comprehensive and independent review,” led by former judge Terrence McMahon.

The 17-page report, which took under two months to prepare, cleared Cannon of any alleged wrongdoing. The university maintains that “the McMahon Report is the proper, comprehensive and independent review of matters connected to the Enbridge Centre.”

The authors of the new report strongly disagreed, concluding the McMahon Report was “undermined by his limited acknowledgement and consideration of the role of academic freedom at universities” and gave “significant benefit of the doubt” to higher-ups at the university.

In an interview with DeSmog Canada, Kate Jacobson — current student and former editor-in-chief of the student paper, the Gauntlet — noted the McMahon Report only looked at whether the university had violated its own “very narrow” policy.

“In my mind, the University of Calgary likes this report because it doesn’t ask any hard questions and exonerates them within the confines of their own policy,” she said.

Furthermore, the University of Calgary’s senior administration refused to participate in the report, despite having what Robinson described as “numerous opportunities in which they could have contributed.” When CAUT came to campus in 2016 to interview faculty members for the report, university provost Dru Marshall warned that the group may not protect the confidentiality of participants.

Without expanding on its reasoning for concluding the report “lacks legitimacy due to flawed process,” the board of governors “considers the Enbridge matter closed.”

Arvai, who now teaches at the University of Michigan, wrote in an email to DeSmog Canada that: “To be perfectly honest, it wasn’t a lot of fun to read the CAUT report because it brought back very vivid memories of the conflicts and intimidation I experienced at the time. But, on a positive note, it’s a vindication after the McMahon report, which felt incomplete and one-sided to me.”

5 Things We Learned from the Damning Report on the University of Calgary’s Connections with #Enbridge https://t.co/hkNXwsCWnV @UCalgary

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) October 13, 2017

5) There are many opportunities for the university to improve, but it won’t be easy

The report concluded with nine recommendations.

They included prohibiting the president and other senior officials from serving for remuneration on any external corporate board, acknowledging publicly that it was wrong for Cannon not to have recused herself from Enbridge-related matters and implementing a policy governing the creation of externally sponsored research institutes.

But that itself might require a re-evaluation of the institution’s entire relationship with the oil and gas industry.

After all, the University of Calgary has a long history of controversies relating to alleged collusion with oil and gas interests, including channeling oil funding for Friends of Science via “research accounts” and housing the Bruce Carson-led Canada School of Energy and Environment.

“This keeps happening because all of these people are part of the same class: they go to the same events, and parties, and Petroleum Clubs,” Jacobson concluded. “They have a vested interest in maintaining the status-quo in Alberta, and that manifests itself on campus in terms of how oil companies are involved.”

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Fracking has induced earthquakes in northwest Alberta, some of which have lasted for months due to residual fracking fluid, according to a new study published in Science today.

Earthquakes induced by fracking have been noticed in Western Canada for about four years, but this is one of the first studies to specifically identify the causes that resulted in “activation.”

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, involves sending a high-pressure mixture of water and chemicals underground to fracture the earth and release oil or gas.

The article, Fault activation by hydraulic fracturing in western Canada, was authored by two University of Calgary geoscientists.

David Eaton and co-author Xuewei Bao compiled a database of more than 900 seismic events back to December 2014, combining publicly available information with records provided by Canadian Discovery Ltd. and Repsol.

That was the first event exceeding magnitude 4 in the area of the Duvernay shale formation.

On February 19, 2015, the Alberta Energy Regulator issued an order requiring operators to shut down any fracking operations following seismic activity over magnitude 4 that occurs within five kilometers of the well.

The research was partly funded by Chevron Canada, which had to shut down operations at a well pad near Fox Creek in June 2015 due to a magnitude 4.4 earthquake.

A magnitude 4.8 earthquake shut down Repsol operations near Fox Creek, Alberta, in January 2016. A year earlier, a magnitude 4.4 earthquake was heralded as likely to be the largest fracking-related earthquake in the world.

There are two main causes of the earthquakes, according to the study.

The first is immediately related to the increased pressure as the fracking process takes place. In those types of earthquakes, activity stopped almost immediately after the operations ended.

“We were able to show that what was driving that was very small changes in stress within the earth that were produced by the hydraulic fracturing operations,” Eaton said.

However, the second and more “unexpected” learning was that one part of the fault remained “persistently active” for several months after operations, continuing to produce micro-earthquake activity.

Eaton says he and Bao were able to best explain that by the infiltration of “high-pressure fluids” from the frack operations into the fault, with the “pressure signature” from fracking slowly diffusing downwards until reaching a pre-weakened fault.

“The management of induced seismic activity for those two scenarios should be quite different,” he says.

“Induced seismicity” refers to tremors that are caused by human activity including mining, reservoir impoundment behind dams and withdrawals such as oil and gas production.

Eaton had previously concluded that between 90 and 95 per cent of seismic activity in Alberta over magnitude 3 in the last half-decade was associated with fracking and underground disposal of wastewater.

Unlike in Canada — where Eaton says a “majority of injection-induced earthquakes are actually linked to hydraulic fracturing” — most earthquakes in the central United States have been linked to large underground disposal of wastewater, a difference between operational and geological causes.

When it was in opposition, the Alberta NDP called for an independent review of fracking largely due to concerns about water contamination; then-leader Brian Mason noted that more than 1,500 fracking licences were approved by the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) in 2013 and called for an investigation into the Fox Creek earthquake of January 2015.

However, a motion to debate a moratorium on fracking was shot down at the 2016 Alberta NDP convention. Nova Scotia and New Brunswick have moratoriums  on fracking, while the federal government is currently being sued by Lone Pine Resources for Quebec’s fracking ban.

Eaton says he hopes the research will result in better regulation and risk assessment processes.

“Regulators are deeply engaged right now in working with industry and academics,” he says. “Our hope is that the new results that we published will help to contribute to science-informed regulations. We’re also hoping that it’s useful to industry as a way to better characterize risk and develop appropriate mitigation strategies.”

Photo: ©Garth Lenz

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Thirteen years ago, Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) issued almost 700 authorizations to projects that would negatively impact fish habitat, mostly in the resource extraction sector: forestry, mining, oil and gas.

By last fiscal year, that number had dropped to 74.

One would think that’s a positive sign. Perhaps the DFO approved far fewer projects, echoing its ambitious 1986 commitment to “no net loss” of fish habitat?

That wasn’t the case.

Thanks to a number of changes — mostly via the “Environmental Process Modernization Plan” of the mid-2000s and the Conservative Party’s industry-led gutting of the Fisheries Act in 2012 — most projects are now “self-assessed” by proponents.

Over the same span, the DFO’s budget was repeatedly slashed, increasingly undermining the department’s ability to monitor and enforce contraventions with “boots on the ground.”

“Harm is happening at the same levels that it always has been,” says Martin Olszynski, assistant professor in law at University of Calgary who specializes in environmental, water and natural resources law. “It’s just that fewer and fewer proponents are coming to DFO and asking for authorization. That’s the reality on the ground.”

The federal government is currently reviewing Canada’s fish habitat protection regime via a standing committee and public consultations, with recommendations expected in early 2017.

Its verdict could determine the fate of millions of trout, salmon, pike, bass and halibut, which could in turn impact the future of projects like the Mount Polley mine, the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline and the Pacific Northwest LNG export terminal.

Fish Habitat No Longer Explicitly Protected

The specifics of fish habitat protection are very complex, involving lengthy acronyms, highly precise wording and subsections of subsections.

Such details also matter a great deal.

Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians and Mark Mattson of the Lake Ontario Waterkeeper argued in the 2014 that “the Fisheries Act was arguably the most important piece of anti-pollution legislation in Canada,” while Linda Nowlan of the WWF described it as “Canada’s strongest environmental law.”

There’s a reason that Barlow and Mattson phrased it in the past tense. As part of the Conservative government’s overhaul of environmental assessment processes via its infamous 2012 omnibus bill, Section 35 of the Fisheries Act was completely rephrased.

No longer did it refer to the “harmful alteration, disruption or destruction of fish habitat,” known as HADD. Instead, the act prohibited “serious harm to fish that are part of a commercial, recreational or Aboriginal fishery,” with “serious harm” defined as “the death of fish or any permanent alteration to, or destruction of, fish habitat,” known as as DPAD.

The difference between HADD and DPAD may seem small. But there’s a good reason that 625 scientists signed a letter to Stephen Harper in 2012 opposing the change.

The act no longer explicitly prohibits damage to fish habitat. Instead, it focuses on protecting “fisheries” and muddies the waters with the idea of a “permanent alteration.” This meant that project proponents don’t have to be overly concerned about the DFO cracking down as the concept of “permanent harm” is so ambiguous.

“It’s a lot easier to look at a stream or river or marine area and decide the habitat has been ‘altered, disturbed or destroyed’ rather than, you know, finding the dead fish and tying that back to a particular activity like somebody bulldozing the side of the stream or something,” says Nowlan, who now works as staff counsel at West Coast Environmental Law.

DFO Gave Self-Assessment Powers to Companies

It’s not like all was well pre-2012.

Olszynski says the number of referrals (which he describes as “inquiries or authorization requests from proponents”) gradually dropped from 13,000 to fewer than 3,500 between 2003 and 2014, accompanying the fall in actual authorizations. At that time, any authorization by the DFO triggered a mandatory environmental assessment (EA).

However, the DFO didn’t have the capacity to conduct basic screening for every project, let alone a full EA as mandated by the Canadian Environment Assessment Agency.

That meant that companies were largely responsible for ensuring that fish habitat was protected with very little oversight, especially in the North.

Can Canada Save Its Fish Habitat Before It’s Too Late? https://t.co/HqMiE7wbdc #cdnpoli #FisheriesAct @WCELaw @molszyns @nikkiskuce pic.twitter.com/bHqYTgLHJD

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) November 14, 2016

Cumulative Effects of Thousands of ‘Minor’ Projects Unchartered

Even that meagre voluntary requirement disappeared in 2012. Today, proponents can’t notify the DFO of proposed projects even if they want to: the system has since been replaced with a “self-review” website that provides information about what projects do and don’t require authorization.

Although the new Fisheries Act wasn’t actually implemented until November 2013, the number of referrals to the DFO dropped dramatically after it was announced in 2012, which Nowlan says “sent a message out to the world that habitat wasn’t as important.”

That was compounded by the aforementioned decline in enforcement, as well as a failure to increase penalties to a level that actually deters bad behaviour.

“In 2012, a big shift was instead of having habitat biologists and protection officers on the ground, out there, able to give fines and all the rest of it, you have people either fired or shifted to different positions,” says Nikki Skuce, project director of Northern Confluence. “There was a whole bunch of offloads.”

Nowlan says there haven’t been any prosecutions for fish habitat damage in Canada since, which is “quite astonishing.”

This has also resulted in even less information available to the DFO. One of the major impacts of this is the inability to assess cumulative effects of projects, such as how a series of small individual withdrawals of water from a river or stream changes flow rate. Together, thousands of minor projects could have massive combined impacts on fish habitat.

If actually tracked, such cumulative effects could be input into databases analyzed via maps and GIS software. Olszynski says that, eventually, the government could begin to tailor regulatory regimes and offsetting requirements to what’s happening on the ground.

“Over a couple of years, hopefully, DFO would start to develop a better sense of the activity on the watershed,” he says. “That’s part of that ability then to finally answer the question that DFO has never been able to answer, which is ‘what’s happening with fish habitat in Canada?’ ”

‘You Have to Have Habitat to Protect Fish’

There are many things the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans could recommend to the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans Dominic LeBlanc to correct some of these issues.

Rephrase Section 35 to refer to explicitly refer to habitat destruction. Alter the act to account for cumulative effects. Commit far more funding to the DFO for monitoring and enforcement to help create a sense that someone’s paying attention; Skuce notes it’s also important to retrain staff to know what to look for and ask the right questions.

Establish a means for proponents of “low-risk” projects to report progress to the DFO. Create a public registry of authorizations, with the long-term goal of crafting appropriate regulations that respond to real-world events. Work with Indigenous nations under the terms of the the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Many seem optimistic the government will make the most of the opportunity to restore protections to pre-2012 levels and exceed them with “modern safeguards.”

Skuce also notes the minister’s father, Roméo LeBlanc, was responsible for implementing habitat protection in the first place in 1977 and that she hopes his son can “do the same thing but even better.”

“It’s such a no-brainer,” Skuce says. “You have to protect habitat to protect fish. The sooner they can do it the better as we’re seeing declining salmon stock and projects being permitted. We’d really like to see this happen sooner rather than later.”

Image: Freshwaters Limited

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"Transparent,” “credible, “world-class” — those are just a few of the words that have been deployed to detail the aspirations of the one-year-old organization tasked with monitoring the air, water, land and wildlife in Alberta.

But there are a lot of questions about whether the Alberta Environmental Monitoring, Evaluation and Reporting Agency (AEMERA), funded primarily by industry, has lived up to its goal to track the condition of the province’s environment.*

Unlike the Alberta Energy Regulator, which the new NDP government is considering splitting into two agencies to separate its conflicting responsibilities to both promote and policy energy development, AEMERA hasn’t spent much time in the public spotlight — yet.

Last October, Alberta’s auditor general slammed the agency for releasing its 2012-2013 annual report in June 2014, well after when it should have been released. The auditor general also said the report “lacked clarity and key information and contained inaccuracies.”

Many of the agency’s projects were missing several details and the auditor general cautioned such omissions “may jeopardize AEMERA’s ability to monitor the cumulative effects of oil sands development.”

And that’s a pretty big problem. Because if Canada is to feasibly establish a strong environmental record, it’s going to need stringent monitoring in Alberta, especially in the Lower Athabasca region where the bulk of the province’s energy industry operates.

The Birth of A Really Long Acronym: AEMERA

AEMERA was dreamt up in 2011 as a means to coalesce the dozens of monitoring organizations working in the province under one banner, firewalling the result from government and industry to avoid conflicts of interest.

Martin Olszynski, an assistant professor in law at University of Calgary who specializes in environmental law, notes that at the time of the agency’s inception, international pressure was limiting market access for oil.

“When someone went to check on the monitoring system, it turned out it was a mess,” Olsznynski says. “We weren’t getting the data that we needed.”

AEMERA — with the Joint Canada-Alberta Plan for Oil Sands Monitoring serving as the transition agency for the three years prior to its official birth — was crafted to solve that problem.

Yet Bill 31, the piece of legislation that conjured up the arms-length agency in late 2013, faced considerable criticism from the get-go. Opposition parties pleaded for more than a dozen amendments.

Many of the proposed tweaks would have addressed the tight relationship between government and the monitoring agency. Amongst other things, the legislation suggested the environment minister would appoint the board and choose when data was released to the public.

Shaun Fluker, an associate professor of law at the University of Calgary, wrote in a 2014 post that the latter provision “arguably undermines the whole structure and suggests that politics can and will override science and transparency on environmental monitoring and reporting.”

All the proposed amendments were shot down. Lorne Taylor, former environment minister under Ralph Klein and renowned anti-Kyoto Accord activist, was appointed as chair of the board. Little has changed since.

Unlike other agencies, AEMERA doesn’t mandate quotas for groups or interests on the board. As a result, Bigstone Cree elder Mike Beaver is the sole indigenous representative on the agency’s seven-member board.

Traditional Ecological Knowledge, a method of integrating indigenous worldviews into policymaking, was listed as a priority in AEMERA’s founding document — yet the auditor generals’ report noted that just three of 38 of AEMERA’s projects surveyed involved Traditional Ecological Knowledge.

Val Mellesmoen, spokesperson for AEMERA, says the organization is working hard to foster strong relationships with indigenous people. In mid-June, the organization appointed a Traditional Ecological Knowledge panel to focus on such issues.

Insufficient Funding for Mobile Air Monitoring Van

Then there’s the overarching issue of funding. Exactly $50 million was decided upon as the max that industry would contribute per year, a number that features a “conspicuously round nature,” Olszynski says.

In late March, news broke that the Wood Buffalo Environmental Association — historically the recipient of the largest amount of money for monitoring — couldn’t afford the $500,000 price tag for a new mobile air monitoring testing van on account of a lack of funding.

Andrew Read, policy analyst at the Pembina Institute, says there’s no public information available as to why $50 million was chosen as the funding cap; he has submitted multiple requests to the federal government (which coordinated the interim monitoring framework prior to AEMERA’s takeover), but hasn’t received any clarification.

Mellesmoen, the agency’s spokesperson, says it was a “gentlemen’s agreement” with the number determined by “an initial estimate that was based on industry providing an overview of what they felt they were currently spending as individual companies.”

Mellesmoen — who previously served as Taylor’s spokesperson when he was an MLA and minister — says there are questions within the agency about the reasoning for the cap.

“Even that funding model needs to be maybe looked at in the long run,” she says.

New NDP Government Could Amend Bill 31

Olszynski says the newly elected NDP could amend Bill 31 to deal with such issues. Prior to being elected as premier, Rachel Notley was an outspoken critic of the monitoring agency, at one point asserting the organization was “nowhere near ready to assume responsibility for the [Lower Athabasca] region.”

The NDP’s platform also pledged to “strengthen environmental standards, inspection, monitoring and enforcement to protect Alberta’s water, land and air.”

This week’s decision to revisit the Alberta Energy Regulator’s mandate represents that focus. The press secretary for Minister of Environment Shannon Phillips didn’t respond to multiple requests for an interview on the subject.

International Experts to Evaluate Oilsands Monitoring

An international panel composed of six scientists will evaluate the performance of the new monitoring system. It plans to “evaluate the extent to which the implementation of the Joint Canada-Alberta Oil Sands Monitoring (JOSM) has improved the scientific integrity of environmental monitoring in the oil sands.”

The panel will deliver its report this fall, which will “help determine the next steps on the oilsands monitoring design and implementation.”

Olszynski emphasizes the uniqueness of AEMERA

“It’s an experiment, an innovative one, an important one,” he says.

Yet there’s much more to be done: stable funding must be solidified, the line between cabinet and organization must be clarified and the data must be analyzed and reported on in a way that regular Albertans can understand. AEMERA also has to expand its monitoring province-wide to fulfill its mandate.

“AEMERA needs to step out and demonstrate that they’re acting in the public interest,” Read says. “We want to see a demonstration of AEMERA actively taking and delivering that unbiased information to the government and providing a perspective on the current state of the environment.”

* Clarification Notice: This article originally stated that AEMERA is funded 100 per cent by industry. While AEMERA gets the bulk of its funding from industry, the agency also receives government funding for general operations and monitoring, evaluation and reporting activities in other areas of the province

Image: Kris Krug via Flickr

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Today Vivian Krause published an opinion piece in The Province claiming “a vote for Vision is a vote for U.S. oil interests.” So, you might be wondering: just who is Vivian Krause? We’re so glad you asked…

An essential component of all public relations campaigns is having the right messenger— a credible, impassioned champion of your cause.

While many PR pushes fail to get off the ground, those that really catch on — the ones that gain political attention and result in debates and senate inquiries — almost always have precisely the right poster child.

And in the federal government and oil industry’s plight to discredit environmental groups, the perfect poster child just so happens to be Vivian Krause.

Krause describes herself as an “independent” researcher and a single mom asking “fair questions” about American funding of Canadian environmental groups. She blogged for many years in relative obscurity before becoming the federal Conservatives’ favourite attack dog.

Krause’s moment in the sun came in January 2012 when Joe Oliver, Canada’s then Natural Resources Minister, released his infamous letter decrying “foreign-funded radical” environmentalists for “hijacking” the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline review process.

Krause had primed the pump for the Conservatives to swoop in and achieve their goal — to discredit environmental groups by building a public narrative about them acting nefariously, thereby justifying spending millions of dollars on audits of charities’ political activities.

Never mind that philanthropic dollars cross international borders all the time. Never mind that the Northern Gateway proposal is sponsored by China’s state-owned oil company Sinopec, along with many other foreign oil companies. Never mind that there’s probably no more legitimate participation in a democracy than citizens signing up to speak at public hearings.

No, once you have a vendetta, inconvenient facts don’t matter. And Krause’s vendetta against environmental groups has been in the works for a long time — ever since she worked in public relations for the farmed salmon industry.

The Salmon Farming Industry and the Birth of a Vendetta

It was due to her interest in promoting salmon farming that Krause started rifling through the tax returns of large American foundations supporting wild salmon advocacy in Canada.

It didn’t take long for Vivian Krause to cook up a conspiracy theory involving American foundations working to undermine Canadian interests — and then to expand that theory to any number of conservation issues in Canada, with a special focus on conservation campaigns that were inconvenient for the oil industry.

To Krause, it seemed suspicious that foundations from across the border were giving money to Canadian groups working on Canadian conservation and energy issues. It must be, Krause surmised, that these big foundations are spending their dollars to manipulate Canadian energy and environment politics to further American interests. And, she went further to suggest, these Canadian groups are acting as pawns of these suspicious foundations.

Speaking of suspicious, by early 2013, Krause had admitted that more than 90 per cent of her income for 2012 had come from oil, gas and mining interests. Groups paying Krause speaker’s fees included the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, the Association for Mineral Exploration and the Vancouver Board of Trade.

Vivian Krause's Convenient Aversion to Climate Change Facts

Fast forward to this week when Krause couldn’t resist weighing into the Vancouver election campaign, claiming that: “For Canada, there is no single economic issue that is more important than getting Alberta oil to global markets.”

While oil is no doubt an important part of the Canadian economy, Krause’s statement overlooks two inconvenient facts:

1) According to Statistics Canada, the oilsands account for only two per cent of the national GDP.

2) A study by Simon Fraser University and The Goodman Group Ltd released this week finds Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain jobs promises are overblown and recommends the proposed expansion be rejected as it is neither in the economic nor public interest of B.C. and Metro Vancouver.

The argument that continued oilsands expansion is a positive for the Canadian economy — and more to the point, the Metro Vancouver economy — is far from a slam dunk.

While Krause enjoys spinning another of her clandestine tales in linking Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson to U.S. foundations, it’s increasingly clear that it’s all a convenient cover story for her to push her own view that the fossil fuel industry should be allowed to expand.

“Voting for Gregor Robertson means voting to support a U.S.-funded, anti-pipeline campaign that continues the U.S. monopoly on Canadian oil, keeping Canada over a barrel,” Krause writes. “When you go to the poll, don’t vote for Gregor Robertson. Vote for Canada.”

Perhaps Krause missed the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which states that governments need to peak emissions, rapidly phase out fossil fuels and transition to 100 per cent renewable energy pronto? Rapidly expanding the oilsands and building new pipelines to serve that expansion doesn’t actually fit into any plans to have an inhabitable earth — not to mention the terrifying consequences an oil spill could reap on Vancouver.

If Krause’s modus operandi is climate change denial, it would be nice if she just stated that right up front, instead of conveniently ignoring it.

(If you want to know where we’re coming from at DeSmog Canada, mosey on over to our About Us page, where you can find out. Hint: we agree with 97 per cent of scientists about climate change, we’re proud to accept donations from anyone who supports our mission and we’re not going to tell you how to vote because that’s not our thing.)

In a recent op-ed in the Calgary Herald, Barry Cooper, a University of Calgary professor and known climate skeptic called on Alberta Premier Jim Prentice to use Krause as an attack dog against environmental groups.

“[Prentice] knows from his work with Enbridge and B.C. First Nations that the real source of opposition to Northern Gateway are the enviros and the deep-pocketed American foundations that fund them,” Cooper wrote. “So, Jim, hire Vivian Krause, who has done a lot of work on this problem, and use the government megaphone to publicize her analyses of the pernicious sources of enviro funding.”

Which raises the question: did someone hire Krause to weigh in — clumsy as it may be — on the Vancouver election?

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With the federal government’s decision on Enbridge’s Northern Gateway oil tanker and pipeline proposal set to come in the next three weeks, the political hot potato is set to be launched back into B.C. Premier Christy Clark’s lap any day now.

Throughout 2012 and 2013, Clark doled out a lot of tough talk when it came to Northern Gateway, going so far as to tell The Globe and Mail that pushing ahead with the pipeline would spur a “national political crisis.”

“Whether or not people supported the pipeline, they would band together to fight the federal government if they decided to intrude into British Columbia without our consent,” she told the newspaper in October 2012.

“This project can only go ahead if it has the social licence to do so. It can only get the social licence from the citizens of British Columbia.”

Speaking to Calgary university students the same month, Clark pointed out the B.C. government could withhold 60 different permits or refuse to hook pumping stations up to the province’s electrical grid.

“The thing is if British Columbia doesn’t give its consent to this, there is no way the federal government or anyone else in the country is going to be able to force it through. It just won’t happen,” Clark said.

These statements don’t leave a whole lot of room for Clark to manoeuvre, especially considering the Globe recently reported that none of her five conditions for approving heavy oil pipelines have been met.

It’s a point that hasn’t been overlooked by B.C. environment and democracy campaigners. Earlier this month, Forest Ethics Advocacy launched a new campaign called Stand Strong Christy.

“Thousands of British Columbians from across the province are sending messages calling on Premier Clark to continue opposing Northern Gateway and standing up for our watersheds, coast and children’s future,” said Nikki Skuce, ForestEthics Advocacy senior energy campaigner.

“With Harper’s likely approval of the pipeline, we need our premier to stand with the majority of B.C. and push back on ever getting Northern Gateway built.”

Meanwhile, another B.C. group is organizing for a citizens’ initiative to put the Enbridge pipeline to an HST-style vote if Clark reverses her position on the project. Dogwood Initiative reports it has 75 local teams collecting petition signatures in advance of the federal government’s decision.

“For this pipeline to be built, First Nations along the route as well as a democratic majority of British Columbians would have to support the project. Neither appears likely,” said Kai Nagata, Dogwood’s energy and democracy director, in a press release.

And another campaign, led by LeadNow and ForestEthics Advocacy, is targeting the 21 Conservative MPs in British Columbia who could feel the electoral fall-out in the next election if the feds green-light Northern Gateway.

While the feds certainly deserve to feel some heat, it’s Clark who the spotlight is likely to shine brightest on in the short-term given her election promise to “put B.C. first” and “stand strong” on her five conditions.

When the Northern Gateway announcement comes down, British Columbians are going to look to Clark to put her money where her mouth is — and it’s hard to see how she’s going to hand off the hot potato this time around.

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In an interview with CBC, Keith said the research institute has been unable to balance corporate interests with its environmental research. Keith also told the CBC that the University of Calgary removed one of its academic employees after bowing to pressure from Enbridge.

"That just fundamentally misconceives the university's role," said Keith, who now works at Harvard University.

Enbridge responded to the charge, saying the company plays no role in university recruitment and "any claims to the contrary are categorically false."

"A lot of people put a lot of effort into this institution," Keith said. "A lot of good will effort. A lot of good people at U of C worked hard and we basically fumbled this institution."

Liberal MLA David Swann from Calgary Mountain View released a statement on his website, saying Keith's statements "confirmed rumors that have circulated for years regarding industry influence over decisions made at the Institute."

"Finally, a senior world-renowned energy researcher has had the courage to name when university management is complicit, or turns a bling eye to the inappropriate influence of money on energy research and policy. Dr. Keith describes the multi-million dollar Institute as a 'failure' essentially unable to produce meaningful alternatives to the fossil fuel agenda in Alberta."

The University told CBC the Institute's mandate involved finding cost-effective ways to resolve the environmental challenges of energy production. "We believe ISEEE is delivering on that mandate," a prepared statement reads.

But as Swann suggests, the role industry money plays at ISEEE represents a growing trend of corporate power in Alberta.

"While there may be explanations—a government that has cut funding to research while wanting desperately to look like it is “leading” in energy and environment research and policy—there is no excuse for university management to ignore the growing influence of industry on both the research agenda and the results, as these results influence government policy. This Alberta government corporate largesse seemed like a good idea to those who dismiss science and don’t understand the importance of independent, unbiased, publicly–funded research."

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