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Alberta counterattack
Kenney strategy to ‘use every means at our disposal’ against foreign-funded groups
Gary Park for Petroleum News
The new Alberta government under Premier Jason Kenney and petroleum industry leaders have been putting the final touches on a full-blown strategy to retaliate against foreign-funded activist groups that have been working to undermine plans for upstream development of the oil sands and pipelines to offshore markets.
The Kenney administration has earmarked an initial C$30 million for a “war room” to counter what the freshly installed premier said are the “lies and myths” about his province’s energy sector that have been spread globally over the past decade.
Kenney told supporters at his election night victory on April 16 that he will use every means at his disposal, including legal action, as well as launching a “public inquiry into the foreign source of funds behind the campaign to landlock Alberta energy.”
He listed the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (which made billions from oil and gas), the Tides Foundation, Lead Now and the David Suzuki Foundation for special attention. (Others expected to face counter-attacks include the Hewlett Foundation, the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, Ecojustice, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Forest Ethics).
In a message to “foreign-funded special interests who have been leading a campaign of economic sabotage against (Alberta), your days of pushing around Albertans with impunity just ended,” he said.
“We have had enough of your campaign of defamation and double standards,” Kenney said. “From this point forward, when you lie about how we produce energy, we will tell the truth assertively and we will use every means at our disposal to hold you to account.”
National party on board Andrew Scheer, leader of the federal Conservative Party, which poses a threat to the Liberal administration of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in a national election this October, told a closed-door strategy session in Alberta on April 11 he was committed to ending “foreign-funded interference” in pipeline regulatory hearings.
However, he did not disclose whether his tactics would include audits or litigation.
But a spokesman for Scheer said a Conservative government would “actively work” to keep foreign-financed intervenors out of Canada’s regulatory process.
Tim McMillan, president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, told the Globe and Mail his lobby organization will be more active in the coming federal election campaign than it was in the Alberta vote.
He praised Kenney’s commitment to tackle environmental groups, which industry leaders target for taking money from U.S.-based foundations while working against pipelines and oil sands expansion.
Vancouver researcher Vivian Krause, a Vancouver researcher and writer who has spent more than a decade investigating how foreign-based anti-oil activists have helped fund the work of nonprofit organizations in Canada, disclosed in a Financial Post article in April, using U.S. tax returns to show how thousands of dollars of U.S. funds were being directed into the campaign to defeat Kenney and his United Conservative Party.
She said tax documents filed with the IRS in the United States show Tides Foundation paid at least US$270,000 to the Tsleil-Wauteuth First Nation in British Columbia specifically “to stop and oppose (the Trans Mountain) pipeline and tanker project.”
Her work has been hailed by Gwyn Morgan, former chief executive officer of Encana, as providing “irrefutable evidence that tens of millions of dollars have been transferred from Tides US to its Tides Canada affiliate.”
In addition, according to a Morgan article in the Financial Post, Krause obtained 70 covering letters showing how recipients used the donations, including mobilizing First Nations against the fear of oil spills and payments to help build “indigenous solidarity resistance to pipeline routes,” maintain “opposition to oil tankers” and “provide legal support for actions constraining tar sands development.”
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