Front Burner - The rhetoric and reality of the anti-Alberta energy report

Episode Date: October 25, 2021

An inquiry into alleged anti-Alberta energy campaigns wasn't able to determine if foreign funding had an impact on derailing energy projects in the province, and found no evidence of wrongdoing. Today, we look at how that final report differs from the province’s rhetoric — past and present.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Angela Starrett in for Jamie Poisson. Two years, four delays and $3.5 million later, Alberta's public inquiry into so-called anti-Alberta energy campaigns is out, all 657 pages of it. And while the report found no evidence that environmental activists did anything wrong and was unable to identify what role they played in actually delaying

or cancelling oil and gas projects in the province, Alberta Energy Minister Sonia Savage's nearly hour-long press conference unveiling the report wrapped like this. And we need to, we need to, we have a right to be mad. And on that note, that concludes this media event. Thank you. Thank you. CBC Edmonton investigative reporter Jenny Russell has closely followed the public inquiry's bumpy road to publication. She joins me now to discuss what it does and notably does not reveal and how its findings are being presented by the Alberta government. Hi, Jenny. Hi, Jenny.

Hi, Angela. I think to put those findings into context, it might be useful to, you know, briefly back up and remind people what this public inquiry initially set out to do and what it set out to find. Yeah, so this was a campaign promise from our now Premier Jason Kenney back in 2019. He said essentially that there was a foreign-funded conspiracy, multiple campaigns that were discrediting Alberta's energy industry and trying to stymie oil and gas development. And he said at a news conference where he announced the inquiry that essentially it would investigate all of the national and international connections, follow the money trail, expose all the interests involved. He also said that it would find out if any laws have been broken. And he also talked a lot about

the misinformation that he said these groups were spreading and how this inquiry was essentially going to expose and cut through that. I'm pleased to be here to make an important announcement about how we will be addressing the problem of foreign meddling to hurt Alberta by interfering in our economy and our politics. Here's what we know. For more than a decade, Alberta has been the target of a well-funded political propaganda campaign to defame our energy industry

and to landlock our resources. And I mean, I would encourage people to go back into our feed and listen to our episode from February 3rd of this year, where you and your colleague, Charles Rusnell, go into this in much greater detail. But just briefly, this inquiry was controversial from the get-go and had quite a bumpy ride, right? Yeah, that's putting it mildly. It was billed as a witch hunt from the start by not only environmental organizations, but political observers in the province who said this is essentially a very thinly veiled attempt to silence legitimate criticism of oil and gas development. They noted that there were no public hearings scheduled for this inquiry. And then there was kind of

controversy after controversy. There was a $905,000 sole source contract that Allen gave to law firm Denton's where his son was a partner. That's something that Charles and I revealed also that he had campaigned for and donated to the justice minister at the time, Doug Schweitzer, who had appointed him to his role. And then, you know, earlier this year, the inquiry published reports on its website that Alan commissioned that critics said, you know, these are full of climate change, denialism and junk science. Alan said, hey, these aren't my opinions. But of course, that didn't really fly. And then as you referenced, it got deadline extension after extension, foreign total, another million dollars added to the budget. They changed the terms of reference, essentially moving the goalposts of what he was expected to produce.

And then this is what we got. in the intro, but very briefly, top line here, what did this report find, in essence, about the foreign funding of so-called anti-Alberta energy activities? Well, found that foreign funding did flow into groups, so environmental, non-governmental organizations that took part in campaigns that were in opposition to oil and gas development. But Allen couldn't say with certainty how much of that money was used to undermine Alberta's energy sector. But even by the most generous estimate in his report, we're talking tens of millions of dollars over a period of 17 years. And he couldn't determine how much of a role that foreign money

actually played in delaying or cancelling resource projects. And not only that, but he found no suggestion of illegality or wrongdoing on the part of any of these groups. And he said multiple times that this report shouldn't be seen to be calling out their conduct or saying it was wrong in any way. Yeah, and I want to get into that a little bit more. I remember at the time of its announcement, Premier Jason Kenney, he referred to Russia, OPEC, as if, you know, these were some of the shadowy figures funding anti-oil sands activism, perhaps for the benefit of their own oil interests. And to be clear, did the report find any evidence of that? No, it didn't. This is a 657 page report.

No, it didn't. This is a 657-page report. And if you go through it and even just do a find function for Russia, I think there's like eight references to it. And most of that's in footnotes related to publication titles. There's a real disconnect between what Kenny said the inquiry was going to expose, kind of this vast network of campaigns all seeking to undermine Alberta, and what it ultimately found. This whole process was born on the campaign trail. And Jason Kenney thought it was politically smart to say that there was a 400-fund conspiracy to go after the oil and gas industry in Alberta. And I think he thought it got him votes.

Well, it plays well as a witch hunt. But when you actually start to dig through the facts, not much of it's substantiated. On one hand, we have government rhetoric. On the other hand, we have a report that a 15-year-old could have produced through web searches. It amounts to a colossal waste of money. I want to dig into what the inquiry actually found. It's 657 pages. The headline figure that the energy minister, Sonia Savage, was highlighting was $1.28 billion. She said it came from foreign

donors. That sounds like a huge sum, but can you break down for me a little bit more about what that $1.28 billion represents? Yeah, so that's the amount of foreign funding that the accounting firm that Alan hired, Deloitte, found flowed to Canadian-based environmental initiatives overall between 2003 and 2019. That sounds like a massive number, and it is. But again, those are general numbers flowing to environmental initiatives. That's not measuring what this inquiry was set out to measure, which is how much foreign money actually went to campaigns opposing oil and gas development in Alberta. either hasn't read or doesn't understand the report, or as we've seen from Kenny's United Conservative government, frankly is using it misleadingly and banking on the fact that a lot of people won't have read the report. And so some of this money, it's not clear it even had anything to do with Alberta, per se. Yeah, as others have pointed out, more than 400 of that, a million of that, was directed to Ducks Unlimited.

Since 1938, Ducks Unlimited Canada has worked with thousands of partners and landowners to conserve, manage, and restore these natural ecosystems. Which is an organization that tries to conserve wetlands for waterfowl. This is not an organization that Allen's report even found had participated in an anti-Alberta energy campaign. And actually, Jason Kenney's former principal secretary is the CEO of Ducks Unlimited. So that $1.28 billion that the government has been citing is really an inflated number. You know, we're talking about anti-Alberta energy campaigns. What does that actually mean? Well, from the terms of reference of the inquiry, it talks about anti-Alberta, it's referring to the geographic space. We're not talking about, you know, being against the province in any sort of way or its interests. slim distinction that was lost at the press conference with Sonia Savage, where it was very

clear that the tack the government is taking is these campaigns are essentially undermining our province as a whole, and there should be seen as hostile to it. And so it was a back to the report, how much of that, you know, $1.28 billion actually specifically went to so-called anti-Alberta campaigns? Well, Alan's report says that grant descriptions that were specifically directing foreign funds to anti-Alberta resource development activity, that those totaled $54.1 million. But Deloitte, the accounting firm, found it could be even lower than that. They could only conclude that it appears the amount of foreign funding directed to these sorts of campaigns ranged between $37.5 million and $58.9 million. So 17 years, we're talking about a few million dollars a year. How does that square with, you know, what the oil and gas sector itself, how's its disposal? Yeah, I think that that was something that critics seized on when this report came out,

which is that you're talking about organizations whose general assets and the amount of funding that they get is dwarfed by the, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars that we're talking about when we're talking about the oil and gas industry. the hundreds of billions of dollars that we're talking about when we're talking about the oil and gas industry. You know, Alan, he goes into great detail about organizations like Greenpeace and the Pemina Institute and how much money they have pulling their tax records. Well, some of these organizations, their assets are, you know, $900,000. I just want to point out, it's worth noting that while this report does not connect the dots between the collapse of Alberta energy projects and funding coming from outside our borders, that there is a wider awareness of the negative market, which we will get to. But I wanted to ask you, you know, how have the environmental groups that were examined in this inquiry,

how have they reacted to this report? Well, they've essentially said that Alan's findings or his lack of findings in a lot of ways show that this was essentially a joke. It was a waste of time and money that was clearly designed to discredit them, but ultimately couldn't do that because there was no smoking gun here, no matter how the UCP government tries to spin this. So one of the people that we talked to is Keith Stewart. He's a senior energy strategist for Greenpeace, which is one of the organizations Alan found had taken part in anti-Alberta energy campaigns. Here's what he had to say. The inquiry along with the

war room were part of Jason Kenney's fight back strategy where he was quite open about he was going to try and intimidate his critics. I think the reality is people recognize we need to act on climate change. Jason Kenney has tried to terrify his opponents. And the reality is no one is afraid of Jason Kenney right now. They're afraid of climate change. Okay. So this report came with six recommendations. One of them I found really interesting. It had to do with consulting with First Nations. You know, we know that there's been literally hundreds of court cases that say, you know, corporations, governments must consult with First Nations. But the first, which had to do with these environmental nonprofits needing greater transparency,

which Savage said would put them on a more level playing field with corporations. What's the response been to that part? I think there's been a lot of derision of that kind of statement. A lot of the information that Alan is relying on in his report that he spells out is taken from tax records. So either the Canada Revenue Agency or the IRS in the US, or they're ripped straight from the website of these groups. So, you know, a typical part of the report where Alan is saying, okay, let's look at Greenpeace. Have they taken part in an anti-Alberta energy campaign? Here's what their website says about the campaigns that they've taken part in.

Here's their publicly available tax information. So what these groups are saying is transparency. Like, we have laid this all out. We've been, you know, to the extent that we've been hiding, it's been in plain sight. We've been trying to elicit support from the public. You know, it's kind of been met with laughter, to be honest. And Kenny's, you know, certainly still got supporters in oil and gas, despite his support dwindling over the pandemic. But are we hearing any positive reception for this report and its

findings? I have to say, pretty few and far between that I have seen. I did see that the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, its president Tim McMillan, gave a statement saying that this report revealed the highly coordinated, well-funded and international nature of these campaigns. But I would say that overall, the reception that this report has been met with has been pretty overwhelmingly negative. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here.

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In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. So I want to talk about how the Alberta government is presenting these findings. I mean, I think the thing that I get a bit confused about here is that, you know, environmental groups fundraised in Canada and abroad and some of that money went into campaigns opposing oil and gas projects in Alberta. But is this really all that surprising, let alone somehow nefarious? No, I don't think anyone would really say that it's surprising that organizations that are deliberately set up around issues related to the environment would try to influence policy on that subject and that other groups would get involved. Keep in mind, and this is something environmental groups have said when we're talking about climate change, something that has kind of clear borders or boundaries. So, of course, you're going to have international interest in, you know, a massive emitter of greenhouse gas emissions. And as Alan himself stated in the report, there's nothing illegal about this and not even necessarily wrong. These groups were, you know, exercising their right to freedom of expression and their

right to fundraise. You're saying there, you know, he found that there was no wrongdoing, yet the energy minister, Sonia Savage, said this at the press conference. And if you ask people in Alberta who lost their job, if they think anything wrong happened, I'm pretty sure they would say, yes, people were hurt. They lost their jobs. They lost their savings. Their families were impacted. The province was impacted. So was it illegal? No. Was it wrong? I think the majority of Albertans would say it was wrong. So what are we to make of the government's framing here?

It's pretty clear they're completely torquing the report. This was, I've been in Alberta for nine and a half years. This was a pretty surreal news conference, even by Alberta politics standards, which is saying quite a bit. There are many instances where Minister Savage took Alan's findings out of context where she extrapolated beyond them. You know, we're talking about a report where Alan couldn't quantify with precision the amount of money involved. And again, he repeatedly said that he wasn't making a value judgment on these organizations. And yet we saw at this press conference Savage, and this was later echoed by the government, other ministers, et cetera, on Twitter, going way beyond that.

And that's not the only disconnect you've observed. Minister Savage tried to make a pretty firm link between this climate activism and the actual cancellation of oil and gas projects, right? She did. She said she was pretty convinced that this activism was a pretty darn big cause of what had happened to all our energy projects in Alberta that had been stymied in any sort of way. Savage, just for a bit of context, she used to work in government relations for Enbridge and after that was a senior director of policy and regulatory affairs for the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association. So she, of course, was trying to draw on or was drawing on her experience anecdotally. But Alan could not quantify that in any sort of way.

And as you referenced earlier, he even said these kind of campaigns coincided with a global drop in oil prices. So that is the backdrop of this. And they played a role. But, you know, look at the context here of where the market was at at that point in time. And on that note of spinning, I mean, Premier Kenney himself tweeted on the day of the inquiry's release, foreign funded misinformation campaigns to landlock Alberta's resources caused untold hardships for thousands of energy workers and

their families. He called these coordinated efforts to harm our province. But did the inquiry find anything on whether or not these environmental campaigners used misinformation? No, it didn't. Alan didn't find any of that. And in fact, he even said a year ago that he wasn't going to be able to find that. He said that he would not have time to essentially fact check whether statements made by these organizations behind these campaigns were misleading or false. He didn't have time to get into whether it was actually misinformation that they were disseminating. And just a bit of a sidebar here, I noticed even though he campaigned on the promise of this inquiry, it was something he championed.

Premier Jason Kenney was not at the press conference presenting the findings of this inquiry. What does that absence say to you? Well, I think it's a pretty clear, tacit acknowledgement that this was essentially a failure. There were a lot of tough questions at the press conference. You know, Savage said that Kenny had other commitments. The government's had this report for nearly 90 days. They knew they had to release it to the public by the end of those 90 days. So to kind of say that he had other scheduling conflicts or whatever, if there had been a smoking gun in this report,

you know, you better believe that Kenny would have been up there presenting the findings. And he talks a lot about personal freedoms, Premier Jason Kenney. But here we have a report that concludes environmental campaigners were just exercising their right to free speech. And yet, were just exercising their right to free speech. And yet, his minister is calling what they did wrong. So, how is this rhetoric supposed to, you know, fit in with a free and fair democracy in Alberta? Well, frankly, it doesn't. It doesn't at all. And if you look at the anti-Alberta, the kind of, you know, I mentioned before that Alan kind of tried to draw the distinction. Oh, we're talking about only anti-projects that are in Alberta, not being against the province. Well, you know, that's not a distinction that the Kenney government makes.

There's been this political culture here for decades that if you are critical of the oil and gas industry, for decades, that if you are critical of the oil and gas industry, if you are critical of certain projects or think that some developments shouldn't go ahead or should be changed in some sort of way that's out of step with what the government and industry wants, that you're somehow against the province and its interests. You're some sort of a traitor to it. So this kind of rhetoric where you're branding groups and individuals as being against the province is really, to be honest, the type of language that you see in non-democratic countries and places where they want to kind of turn public opinion against certain groups. And I think that's dangerous to go down that road.

Jenny, thank you so much for this. Thank you. And that is it for our show today. Thanks so much for joining us here on FrontBurner. I'm Angela Starrett, and I'll talk to you again tomorrow.