The Corporate Mapping Project (CMP) has produced numerous research papers documenting how the oil and gas sector in Canada defends and advances its interests.
Shannon Daub’s CMP research — using freedom of information (FOI) requests to access records of government-industry meetings and digging into the lobbyist registry — has unmasked how the fossil fuel industry operates in British Columbia. As she explained in an interview, under the previous B.C. Liberal government, her FOIs:
showed the extent to which both the energy and attention of government officials is monopolized by fossil fuel industry interests — endless meetings and requests for briefings, and processes of engagement and consultation, and submissions of briefs, reports, etc. But also, proactively by the government, who clearly, through the Ministry of Natural Gas [now the Ministry of Energy, Mines, and Petroleum], view themselves as being in the service of the industry. In the FOIs we asked for records of all meetings held, in which public officials from the B.C. government travelled to Calgary to meet with energy companies. And then we counted, and in a 33-month period [January 2015 to September 2017] there were over 175 times that a fairly senior government official — like deputy ministers, assistant deputy ministers, directors of branches — one or more of them flew to Calgary to meet with the industry — an average of more than five meetings per month.[1]
In another CMP report, CCPA-B.C. resource policy analyst Ben Parfitt dug into the relationship between the fossil fuel industry and B.C.’s Oil and Gas Commission (OGC), the provincial regulatory agency for the sector. The resulting study, Captured: British Columbia’s Oil and Gas Commission and the Case for Reform, exposes that disturbing entanglement.
As Parfitt explains, “capture” manifests in numerous ways. Among the signs that a public agency has been captured and is serving private interests is:
when people move into positions of power within the agency from the regulated industry. The reverse of this may also indicate capture. In other words, when people from the agency subsequently assume positions of power and influence within the regulated industry. The movement from one to the other is known as “the revolving door” phenomenon. This, too, clearly applies to the OGC. Ken Paulson, the agency’s current chief operating officer and executive vice president, was formerly a senior engineer for ATCO Gas, Alberta’s largest distributor of natural gas. He sits on the board of the Society of Petroleum Engineers and is vice chair of the Western Regulators Forum (WRF). According to Bloomberg, the WRF is an interprovincial alliance of regulatory agencies “working to increase efficiency in the process of approving energy projects.” Paulson’s pedigree is far from unusual. Rob McManus, the commission’s [first] Commissioner and Chair of the Board, previously worked for CAPP, Shell Canada Limited and Gulf Canada Resources.[2]
Of the seven current OGC board members and vice presidents, Parfitt’s report finds “four have served in varying capacities for resource extraction firms before or concurrent with their roles with the OGC.”
Parfitt’s Captured report also outlines how the governance of the Oil and Gas Commission ensures the industry’s needs are paramount, and then details numerous examples of how B.C.’s OGC has served and protected the industry it is purportedly tasked with regulating and overseeing:
A dramatic acceleration in gas drilling permit approvals;
The bestowing of massive royalty credits, such that the public returns to the treasury for the extraction of this collectively owned resource have hit rock-bottom, while the industry has been spared billions in royalty payments, despite record levels of production;
Turning a blind eye to regulatory infringement — indeed a systematic regulatory breakdown — as the industry built dozens of unlicensed dams, a number of which threatened public safety, and then failing to impose meaningful fines or other penalties when cases of rule-breaking were exposed;
Failing to adequately consult with local First Nations about drilling permits, or to jointly consider cumulative environmental impacts with Indigenous people; and
Failing to disclose critical reports to the public, including one 2013 investigation that found cases of leaking gas wells and groundwater contamination, and another 2014 audit that found the industry was systematically violating rules designed to protect endangered caribou.
The same insidious influence operates federally and in other provinces, most notably Alberta, sometimes in nuanced ways, and sometimes quite crassly.
Donald Gutstein and Kevin Taft, in each of their illuminating books, document how, in particular, the Business Council of Canada (BCC, formerly known as the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, and before that the Business Council on National Issues) has brought together the leading actors of the corporate sector behind a unified policy agenda. The corporate lobby has also created new think tanks like the Energy Policy Institute of Canada (EPIC) to articulate that shared agenda.
As Gutstein, a Simon Fraser University academic, noted in his book The Big Stall: How Big Oil and Think Tanks Are Blocking Action on Climate Change in Canada, the corporate sector has, by and large, long supported carbon pricing, seeing it as an acceptable concession and far preferable in their view to regulatory fiat. As the Trudeau and Notley governments were developing their climate plans, “[John] Manley reminded all and sundry that the Business Council of Canada [the association of Canada’s largest 150 corporations, then headed by Manley] had signed on to carbon pricing, so long as it meant getting resources out of the ground and to their customers. ‘I would be very surprised if there were no pipelines emerging from this,’ Manley said at a business forum in Lake Louise, Alberta, sponsored by law firm Bennett Jones. ‘Acquiescence to a price on carbon really is looked at as one side of a grand bargain that would see pipelines built in exchange.’”[3]
There has been a revolving door of people between industry, government bureaucracies and elected officials. For example, Jim Carr, the Trudeau government’s first minister of natural resources, was previously the CEO of the Business Council of Manitoba and a key player in the western Canada grouping of corporate organizations seeking to define and control the energy narrative in Canada.[4] Carr’s first chief of staff, Janet Annesley, was previously the vice-president of communications with CAPP, and before that a senior executive with Shell. (She’s since moved back to Husky Oil.)
The revolving door also permeates the lobbying and public relations industry, where personalities with long-standing relationships and tremendous access frequently serve as intermediaries between the domains of industry, government and partisan politics. Key individuals often work as both partisan campaigners on the one hand, active within the inner circles of our political parties and directing election campaigns, and as paid lobbyists for fossil fuel companies on the other. This crosses all party lines. For example, the co-chair of the federal Liberals’ 2015 election campaign, Dan Gagnier, was forced to resign from that role a few days before the election, after it was revealed he was giving paid lobbying advice to TransCanada on how to get their pipeline projects approved. (He was previously a senior civil servant, and also served as vice-chair of EPIC during the Harper years.) CAPP has bolstered its lobbying efforts by hiring a government relations firm called Bluesky Strategy Group; those carrying the CAPP file with Bluesky include Joe Jordan, a former Liberal MP, and Raphael Brass, who formerly worked for Joyce Murray.[5] Similarly, long-standing NDP campaigners, strategists, senior staffers and former elected leaders — such as Brian Topp, Marcella Munro, Jamey Heath, Moe Sihota and Brad Lavigne — now work for leading PR and government relations firms such as Hill+Knowlton, Global Public Affairs and KTG Public Affairs (co-founded by Topp), which in turn count fossil fuel corporations as clients.
Taft, the author of Oil’s Deep State, brings to his writing considerable insider experience as a former Alberta civil servant and former leader of the Alberta Liberal Party. He similarly exposes the intricate and nefarious ties between the fossil fuel industry and government, and explores how economic reliance on fossil fuel extraction and export poisons and distorts our democracy. Taft’s book is built around two political theories: “one concerning ‘institutional capture’ — in which public institutions become instruments of private interests [the same theory employed by Parfitt] — and the other concerning ‘deep states,’ the state-within-a-state that arises when several key public institutions are captured and held for a long period by the same private interest.” Taft argues that “the oil industry has captured and held enough different public institutions for a long enough time that a deep state has formed in Alberta and to a lesser degree across Canada, which by nature resists meaningful action on global warming. Naming, defining, and identifying ‘institutional capture’ and ‘oil’s deep state’ enables us to understand and counter these processes, and to defend democracy and the environment.”[6]
Taft offers examples of how the industry threatens politicians who fail to toe the line on support of oil and gas, including outrageously low royalty rates charged for the extraction of what is a public resource.
Why does the fossil fuel industry behave this way? Because, says Taft, “Global warming is a death sentence for the fossil fuel industry, and to delay that sentence, the industry has spent untold millions of dollars and many years capturing key democratic institutions.”[7]
Taft’s opening chapter tells of the court trial of Bruce Carson. Carson spent years as a senior policy adviser to Stephen Harper, but in 2009 left his position in the Prime Minister’s Office and moved to Calgary, where he set up a multimillion-dollar research centre on energy and the environment at the University of Calgary called the Energy Policy Institute of Canada (or EPIC), funded primarily by major fossil fuel corporations. In 2012, Carson was charged with influence-peddling, and in 2017 was found guilty. His trial exposed the strategy employed by the industry to get the political and economic outcome it desired. “The hundreds of pages of evidence presented in Carson’s illegal lobbying trial shed light on the permanent campaign by Canada’s oil industry to influence government.”[8]
The board of EPIC includes such notable figures as Conservative Senator Douglas Black, former corporate CEO and federal cabinet minister David Emerson, former New Brunswick Premier Frank McKenna (a key operative with political ties to the Liberals who now sits on numerous corporate boards including Toronto-Dominion Bank and is a strong advocate for the oil sands), and former CEO of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives Thomas d’Aquino. Together they “formed an all-star network for the oil industry that could plug into Conservative and Liberal circles; federal and provincial interests; B.C., the Prairies, Ontario, Quebec, and Atlantic Canada; corporate and government figures; and elected and appointed officials. Few calls from this group were likely to go unanswered.”[9]
During the Carson investigation:
in an interview with RCMP, d’Aquino explained that “EPIC’s goal was to develop an Energy Strategy for Canada . . .” This was a goal of remarkable ambition. EPIC and its backers, primarily the oil industry, weren’t lobbying to change a particular policy or get support for a specific project. They weren’t looking for a tax break or a change in environmental standards. Their goal was to do something that would be led by national governments in other democracies: develop an energy strategy — oil, gas, coal, electricity, nuclear, pipelines, renewables — for all of Canada. In effect, EPIC was founded with the ambition of capturing the energy policy of a nation, with the oil industry de facto in a privileged position. If it succeeded, every resident, government, and business in the country would be affected. D’Aquino told RCMP investigators that EPIC’s strategy had four points. The first was to get “all the private sector leaders engaged and on board.” Given the people and money behind EPIC, this was in hand before the organization was even launched. Second was “to build support by engaging the academic community, the ones writing about energy.” Third was to build “public sensitivity” through newspapers and magazines, and fourth was to “take their ideas for an energy strategy . . . to municipal, provincial and federal governments.”[10]
All this work found a home within the University of Calgary. Carson was originally hired by the university to head up the new Canada School of Energy and Environment (CSEE), an institute that also had close ties to the oil industry generally and in particular the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers — the main lobby group for the industry. The interconnections between industry and the university sector facilitated by CSEE were concerning enough to the Canadian Association of University Teachers that they issued a 2011 report outlining their concerns about the impact on academic freedom and research integrity.
“Carson’s offer of employment with the University of Calgary provided him with a base salary of $258,000 per year, a car allowance of $900 per month, and a package of other benefits,” reports Taft. “It also granted him an adjunct appointment in the newly formed School of Policy Studies at the University of Calgary, reporting to its director, Dr. Jack Mintz [the former head of the C.D. Howe Institute, the free-market think tank in Toronto]. The School of Policy Studies, soon renamed the School of Public Policy, had been launched just a few months earlier with a $4 million endowment from one of Calgary’s top oil investors and an early grant of $1 million from Imperial Oil. Mintz himself was on the board of directors of Imperial Oil.”[11] Once he set up EPIC, Carson was simultaneously drawing pay from both CSEE and EPIC.
Even changes in government that see progressive parties win office fail to disrupt the deep state capture Taft exposes in his book. In many respects, 2015 saw a political wind-change, with Rachel Notley’s NDP elected to majority government in Alberta, and then later that year Justin Trudeau’s Liberals gaining a federal majority and booting Harper’s Conservatives from government. But as Taft writes:
The events of 2015 looked like a step backward for fossil fuels in Canada and a step forward for low-carbon alternatives. But while the political landscape had changed, the interests of the fossil fuel industry were unrelenting. The big message at Rachel Notley’s first news conference as premier was to tell her ‘partners in the energy industry’ that “they can count on us to work collaboratively with them.” And while the federal Liberals committed Canada to limit carbon emissions under the Paris Climate Agreement and imposed a national price on carbon emissions, they also approved the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline and supported the Keystone XL pipeline, both of which aided oil sands expansion.[12]
The Notley government remained firmly friendly to the fossil fuel sector. The climate plan produced by the Notley government would not lower Alberta’s GHG emissions any time before 2030, but merely aspired to flatline them, and that doesn’t count the emissions stemming from expanded oil sands production that are combusted in other jurisdictions. In the face of growing evidence of climate emergency, the Notley climate plan was a declaration of defeat before it left the gate.
Taft does leave his readers with a bit of hope, which is worth holding on to as we consider what needs to now change. Despite his revelations of deep ties between government and the oil industry, Taft makes a point of stressing that neither Alberta nor Canada are, in his view, “petrostates.” He explains, “Petrostates are conceived in petroleum, while oil deep states are captured by petroleum. The difference is fundamental. ‘Capture’ suggests that a heritage of democracy survives inside the cage, a heritage that stands apart from oil and is ready to be released and renewed. The struggle over global warming will determine whether this release and renewal will happen, whether the life-and-death contest for the fossil fuel industry may prove also to be a life-and-death contest for modern democracy.”[13]
Footnotes:
[1] For more on the research referred to here, see two CMP reports: Shannon Daub and Zoe Yunker, “BC’s last Climate ‘Leadership’ Plan Was Written in Big Oil’s Boardroom (Literally),” CMP Commentary, September 18, 2017, https://www.corporatemapping.ca/bcs-last-climate-leadership-plan-was-written-in-big-oils-boardroom-literally/; and Nicolas Graham, Shannon Daub and William Carroll, Mapping Political Influence: Political Donations and Lobbying by the Fossil Fuel Industry in BC (Vancouver: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and Corporate Mapping Project, March 2017).
[2] Ben Parfitt, Captured: British Columbia’s Oil and Gas Commission and the Case for Reform (Vancouver: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and Corporate Mapping Project, 2019).
[3] Donald Gutstein, The Big Stall: How Big Oil and Think Tanks Are Blocking Action on Climate Change in Canada (Toronto: James Lorimer and Company, 2018). P. 204.
[4] Gutstein, The Big Stall, 139.
[5] See https://ipolitics.ca/2016/11/16/capp-bolsters-lobbying-efforts-with-bluesky-strategies/ .
[6] Kevin Taft, Oil’s Deep State: How the Petroleum Industry Undermines Democracy and Stops Action on Global Warming - in Alberta, and in Ottawa (Toronto: James Lorimer and Company, 2017). P. 10.
[7] Taft, Oil’s Deep State, 18.
[8] Taft, Oil’s Deep State, 24.
[9] Taft, Oil’s Deep State, 29.
[10] Taft, Oil’s Deep State, 30.
[11] Taft, Oil’s Deep State, 31.
[12] Taft, Oil’s Deep State, 49.
[13] Taft, Oil’s Deep State, 207.