Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
POD: I ❤️ 🌐 Oil & Gas. Turns out the Canadian oil and gas industry is majority foreign owned
157 Plays3 years ago
For all the time and effort Jason Kenney, Postmedia and the oil and gas industry have put in to convincing people that evil foreign funded environmentalists have ulterior motives it turns out that the Canadian oil and gas industry is majority foreign owned. This fact has been discovered by Gordon Laxer and published in a new report titled, Posing as Canadian: How Big Foreign Oil captures Canadian energy and climate policy. Host Duncan Kinney sits down with Laxer to discuss his groundbreaking report.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction & Podcast Promotion
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey folks, Duncan Kinney here to remind you that the Progress Report is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network. A pod on the network that I want to highlight is the latest from Kino Lefter, where everyone's favorite Canadian socialist movie podcaster, Evan McDonald, is joined by Karen Mills of the Alberta Advantage to discuss one of the latest entries in the MCU, The Eternals.
00:00:19
Speaker
And while I don't actually plan on ever watching this movie, except maybe like on an airplane if I was bored or something, I really did enjoy the podcast and I really do enjoy Evan McDonald's analysis of the world and of movies. And I'm also here to give you the latest pitch on why you should become a Progress Report donor. And I am going to be leaning on the holiday season for this one.
00:00:39
Speaker
It is December, the Christmas cheer is flowing, Christmas is coming, and the best possible gift you could give me, your parasocial podcast pal, is to become a recurring donor to The Progress Report. Your donation ensures that we are able to pay rent, make payroll, and also produce this very podcast that you're listening to right now. So if you can spare five, ten, fifteen dollars a month, whatever you can afford, Jim and I would be very grateful.
00:01:06
Speaker
There is a link in the show notes, or you could go to theprogressreport.ca and you could put in your credit card info and become a recurring donor today. Now, onto the show.
Introducing Gordon Laxer & His Report
00:01:29
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney, recording today here in Amiskweshiwa-Skygun, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta, here in Treaty 6 territory on the banks of the Kasiscasa-Wana Sippy, or the North Saskatchewan River. Joining us today, we're very excited, is Gordon Laxer, a founding director of the Parkland Institute, a professor emeritus at the University of Alberta, and
00:01:51
Speaker
author, commentator, as well as the very first chairperson of the Toronto chapter for the Waffle Movement for an Independent Socialist Canada, Gordon. Welcome to The Progress Report. How are you doing? I'm doing well. Great to be here.
00:02:07
Speaker
It's a real pleasure to have you on the reason I reached out to you the reason you're on the podcast today is a report you recently released, titled posing as Canadian, how big foreign oil captures Canadian energy and climate policy.
00:02:22
Speaker
And it was released, you know, I read through the report, I read the executive summary the other day. This is like important foundational knowledge that anyone who commentates about or thinks about or writes about or has opinions about energy or oil and gas or climate policy in this country needs to be aware of.
00:02:47
Speaker
And I mean, I hate to say it, but I don't think I'm speaking out of school here where it's just like no one gave a shit. I don't know. I think if the average Canadian learned this that they would be quite angry. Oh, I agree. I think it fills in a huge gap on the discourse here when it comes to the influence of foreign money and foreign ownership in the oil and gas sector in Canada here.
00:03:13
Speaker
We have just gone in Alberta here through a massive media cycle, really for the past decade where Jason Kenney and Vivian Krauss and Cap and their kind of enablers in the media have spent the past decade repeating the line that organized climate action in this country is essentially some big foreign funded plot. But it turns out, and what your report really lays out is that the other side, the oil and gas and their kind of enablers in media and politics,
Foreign Oil Influence in Canada
00:03:42
Speaker
they are guilty of exactly what they have been accusing their enemies of doing. Can you walk us through kind of like the big findings of your report, what you want people to take away from the report? Yes. And it's the Allen inquiry, the public inquiry, really aimed at a molehill and then missed the Rockies because the, you know, the Kennedy government set up a public inquiry and a war room to counter what they called
00:04:13
Speaker
well-orchestrated, well-planned, foreign-funded attack on Alberta oil to landlock Alberta oil. And what they found is that there was only a pittance of money, actually the money that came in directly to help fund groups that were trying to block the export of Alberta oil.
00:04:40
Speaker
that foreign funding was actually less than the cost of the public inquiry itself. So why would you have a public inquiry to look into something that's supposed to be big and it costs more for the inquiry itself? So it was a pittance and the purpose of trying to target environmentalists was to, it was just the McCarthyist idea that we will label them and we will get
00:05:10
Speaker
forensic auditor and we'll just get, you know, so people will just assume then that these are bad guys doing illegal things. And so it was much better as an election strategy for Kenny in 2019 when his party won the election than it was to actually go through it. So what we found is what we looked at is, you know, the big foreign oil
00:05:34
Speaker
is much more influential, is hugely funded, just on a scale that is just so immensely different than the environmentalists. The environmentalists, I mean, why were the environmentalists, why did they ever campaign to try and stop pipelines? Well, it's because the emissions from the production of oil and gas in Canada is the biggest single source of emissions and
00:06:02
Speaker
you know, the oil and gas industry is centered in Alberta. So it wasn't anti-Alberta where they're just trying to stop taking the climate seriously. But big foreign oil, what we looked at, if you're foreign-owned, it means you're foreign-funded. And your report really gets into the granular detail, right, of just how foreign-owned the ostensibly Canadian oil and gas industry is, right?
00:06:32
Speaker
Yes, Sonia Savage, the energy minister, said that it was foreign funding is something we should be concerned about. Well, you know, why would people who an industry which is so overwhelmingly foreign owned and funded start a campaign and they were the ones who started it and talk about this
00:06:59
Speaker
this terrible nefarious conspiracy. So what we did is we looked at the Board of Governors of CAP, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. It's the apex oil and gas lobby in Canada. It's mainly centered in Alberta. But they spend a lot. So what I did is I looked at their Board of Governors to find out how many of the corporations on their board
00:07:28
Speaker
are foreign owned and how many are Canadian owned.
Extent of Foreign Ownership
00:07:31
Speaker
So we looked at the Bloomberg terminals so you can go in there at any time and find the ownership that is of these companies and where the residents are. So we found that 30 of the 48 corporations were on CAPS board were confirmed as either 100% foreign owned or majority foreign owned.
00:07:58
Speaker
Another seven were likely majority foreign owned. And we say likely because if it was less than 50% of their shares were actually reported and it was still foreign owned, mainly foreign owned, we couldn't then conform it. But if you add those two together, 77% of CAHPS Board represents corporations that are either fully foreign owned or majority foreign owned.
00:08:27
Speaker
And if you look at the actual production of oil and gas, the foreign-owned ones are the big ones. There are no big Canadian oil and gas corporations. There has not been a big one since Suncor took over Petra Canada in 2009. So if you look at the funding of CAP, so it's a foreign corporate funding.
00:08:50
Speaker
The corporations on its board that are foreign-owned produce 97% of their oil, and CAP's fees for their own membership fees for these corporations is based on their level of oil and gas production. So CAP doesn't make its annual budget publicly available.
00:09:11
Speaker
But it does say that the greater the level of production, the higher the fees. So we can conclude that something like 97% of CAPS funding is foreign funded.
00:09:29
Speaker
And it's a, it's a, I do want to get into the methodology and how you got, how you figure this out and like the Bloomberg terminal stuff, as well as the like the kind of faulty methodology that is used by stats can and all that stuff. But it is incredible that like, we just don't even contemplate, you know, in the discourse, the fact that
00:09:52
Speaker
that oil and gas is a part of a global capitalistic system. And global capital is by definition, global. And those folks and the people who own these companies, where the benefits accrue, right? The shareholders are both the owners of the company and the vast and the huge chunk of these companies have like dividends and stuff, right?
00:10:16
Speaker
These proceeds are going to people who don't live in Canada and who very well may have financial and political interests that are at odds with both folks who live in Canada, as well as the goal that I hope everyone shares, which is of ensuring that we have a habitable planet in 50 to 100 years.
00:10:43
Speaker
Yes, because their business model is to produce as much as they can for as long as they can, regardless of the damage it does. And of course, they love to talk about it, and some of them now, they used to be into climate denial. For many years, when the oil industry knew in the 1950s
00:11:02
Speaker
The big oil companies knew that it caused global warming, and they were warned about that. And they did nothing. They denied it for many years. Now, recently, they started talking a good game. But the thing you have to realize is the longer they talk, they sit down and talk, they're making tens of millions of dollars a day talking and delaying action. So they're going to look, pretend they're good guys. And they are lobbying
00:11:32
Speaker
both the federal and provincial Alberta governments, just about daily. There was a secret committee that the federal government set up with CAP, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, when COVID started. Most of us were stuck at home for those of us who could work from home. But CAP didn't stop its lobbying. And so they got a secret industry committee. They met weekly.
00:12:02
Speaker
And they, the oil industry came up with a whole bunch of demands and about half of them were implemented. You know, sort of delaying action, trying to get the public to pick up the tab on the environmental liabilities in Alberta. In fact, they did, the Canadian government picked it up instead of, you know, the oil industry is making so much. I've done another study which is also going to come out very soon.
00:12:27
Speaker
which shows that the oil industry takes out the foreign section of the oil industry, takes out $23 billion a year from Alberta, actually from the tar sands itself. It doesn't even touch down in Canada. It just goes out to foreign orders.
00:12:45
Speaker
And, you know, when you're thinking of that level, that is close, you know, something like half the level of the Alberta budget. So, I mean, this is a huge amount of money, and they are blocking action. The thing is, the candidate for
00:13:01
Speaker
The biggest source of emissions in Canada is the production of oil and gas. It's on the supply side. Almost everything that governments are doing is on the demand side. The demand side matters, you know, so they put up electricity, right? Or carbon tax or whatever. But we are the G7 bad boy.
00:13:27
Speaker
that we are by far the laggard in G7 and
Political Influence & Astroturfing
00:13:31
Speaker
emissions. And the reason is the power of oil, big oil, and it's big foreign oil. I think your report makes an incredibly compelling case. Essentially, you've just kind of summarized the entire thing. And I think we're going to link to it in the show notes if you want to read it. There's also an op-ed by Gordon that the Toronto Star published.
00:13:58
Speaker
This is an incredibly important bit of analysis and research that no one really wants to talk about or acknowledge. It is the lie kind of underneath the entire effort. This has really been a decade of work by Vivian Krause and the conservative movement and CAP and their agents to cast the environmental movement as this big foreign funded boogeyman.
00:14:27
Speaker
You know, and you got a quote. You have a quote in your report that it's good. It's like, I don't know where this saying comes from. You just it's maybe it's apocryphal, but it's like, why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own? It's it's. And, you know, it's like it's a classic tactic of of, you know, autocratic regimes to simply just accuse their enemies of what they themselves are doing.
00:14:56
Speaker
I also really liked your analogy and let's go back to the start of the report because I think your start, your report starts off with the inquiry quite rightly. And I really did enjoy your analogy between Kenny kind of calling the inquiry and then having it quickly get out of control and turn into a huge embarrassment and a liability to David Cameron, the PM of the UK calling the Brexit referendum and having it get away from him quite, quite badly as well.
00:15:22
Speaker
Yes, I do think Kenny did this partly. I mean, he did it at the behest of many ways of Cap, because Cap called for this, Tim McMillan, two months before the Alberta election, made a speech in Edmonton to the Chamber of Commerce and said, we've been the victims. Here it is, big oil. We are the victims of a very well-orchestrated, well-planned foreign-funded attack. So I think within Kenny's group, the United Conservative Party,
00:15:51
Speaker
I think it's those, there are those who are, want to do something who, you know, feel like they're being hurt, especially the smaller producers. So they wanted this inquiry and, you know, to blame somebody. It's that sort of idea that, you know, there's got to be some kind of nefarious reason why we're not prospering.
00:16:18
Speaker
And I think that Kenny is very worried about a right wing split off from his party. I mean, he put together the Wild Girls and the Progressive Conservative Party in 2017, and he's worried about a revolt from the right. So I think that's one of the motivations that he did the war room and public inquiry.
00:16:42
Speaker
Yes. And to go back to the Brexit analogy, I think the consequences and the kind of like scale of failure there is different. I mean, David Cameron and eminent ended up resigning, right? Unfortunately, we've had no such luck with Jason Kenny, despite how embarrassingly off the rails, the war room and the inquiry have gone. But they have been unequivocal failures and the people of Canada and Alberta have largely seen through what was very transparently
00:17:11
Speaker
and nakedly propagandistic exercise for, again, the poor Whittle Oil companies, the largest, most profitable actors in our economy to suggest that a few million dollars coming from foundations to nonprofits and environmentalists was the thing that was holding them back was on its face ridiculous. Yes. The scale of it, if you look at Sandy Garasino's analysis,
00:17:42
Speaker
She wrote for the National Observer. She said that when she looked at all the charitable foundations and grants given around the world, and only 1% of them went to climate plans, most of them went to other environmental things, and only 1% of the 1% went to Canada.
00:18:03
Speaker
So we're talking about, what is that? One tenth of one percent, or one hundredth of one percent of all these things. A very small number, whatever the percentage ends up being. Yes, it's tiny, but it plays a propaganda role.
00:18:24
Speaker
And the amazing thing is, you know, the CAP has copied their big brother, the API, the American Petroleum Institute, which represents most of the same companies. And the American Petroleum Institute has a number of fake citizen groups, astroturf groups that attend their, you know, citizen-based.
00:18:51
Speaker
And CAP and the API taught CAP how to do this. And so what does CAP do? It just sticks Canadian in front of the same organizations that are living in the, you know, the API created in the US.
00:19:08
Speaker
So for example, in the States, they created a group called Energy Citizens. So CAP created a group called Canada's Energy Citizens. And they stick a maple. If they have no imagination, even. So they're pretending to be Canadian nationalists, and they just take direction from Big Brother, Big Oil in the US. And it's total fake. But I'm afraid, I mean, some people may fall for it.
00:19:38
Speaker
Canada's energy citizens, you know, they say they got a quarter of a million Facebook followers and likes and all that kind of stuff. And they, if you look at their page, it does look like it's a genuine citizen-based group.
00:19:53
Speaker
It does. And we are going to get into that later. I do, I do want to take a minute just to get into the meat of your findings and just kind of look at these tables. And like, again, we'll, we'll link to it, uh, in the show notes, but like the, uh, just the, let's just start off with the obvious ones, which are just like literally the straight up 100% for I know. Companies that operate here in Alberta, right? Husky, for instance.
00:20:19
Speaker
And I 70% owned by Lee Cushing, right? Who is I think a Hong Kong national, right? We've got Imperial oil. Very, I mean, everyone knows, but if you don't know, it's just a subsidiary of ExxonMobil, like the one of the largest, if not the largest oil company in the world.
00:20:36
Speaker
But we've also got Nexon, you know, which is owned by C-NOC. We've got Chevron. We've got Patronus, which is owned by Malaysia. We've got BP Canada, British Petroleum. We've got Repsol. We've got Shell Canada. We've got Total. All these companies are on the board of governors for CAP. And all of them are just directly for an ounce. Yes. And let's just get this out of the way, right? Because those are the easy ones, right?
00:21:03
Speaker
And if you look at Petronas, for example, the past chair of CAP came from Petronas, Mark Fitzgerald. So these companies play an important role in CAP. But okay, let's go on to the ones that are majority Canadian-owned and that people may think are, sorry, majority foreign-owned and people may think are Canadian-owned.
00:21:25
Speaker
Yeah, so these are the publicly traded companies. So you're able to go into the Bloomberg terminal and kind of look at the records and see where the majority of shares is owned by their country of origin of the people who own it. And these are non-subsidiary. So these aren't owned by some big bad oil company. But these are companies that people commonly think of as Canadian. They're based in Canada. Their head office is based in Canada. But the majority of their owners are, in fact, not Canadian.
00:21:53
Speaker
And these are companies that you might be aware of like birchcliffe energy which i think is an intermediate right cenovus you know 83% of their shares are on bloomberg and 72% of the shares that you were able to check on bloomberg are foreign owned cenovus is kind of commonly looked at as this
00:22:13
Speaker
Canadian success story, but it's not. And it's even more egregious when you consider the origin of Cenovus, which was that it was created, you know, originally in the mode of economic nationalism, right? Peter Lahit created the Alberta Energy Corporation. And eventually that merged with Pan-Canadian, created in Canada, and Canada split into two pieces. And one of those pieces was Cenovus, right?
00:22:38
Speaker
You know, we've got Bonavista Energy Corp. You know, Bonterra Energy Corp. The big daddy, of course, CNRL, you know, the largest oil company in Canada, 77% of their shares are on Bloomberg and 55% of them are foreign out. Like, you know, we're absolutely wild.
00:23:03
Speaker
Oh, Vintiv, okay, speaking of Sonovus, we'll talk about the other half of when and Canada split into two, or when Pan-Canadian and Auburn Energy Court merged. What was left over was in Canada, eventually that became a Vintiv and they just kind of have picked up stakes and moved to the United States altogether. And again, 71% of their shares are on Bloomberg Terminal, 87% of them are foreign owned. Even like smaller companies like Painted Pony or Payto Exploration, you know, the vast majority of the
00:23:33
Speaker
The shares that are you're able to check out on Bloomberg terminal are foreknowned And one of the examples that I'm really glad you kind of dug into was quest air energy Corp Good old Michael Binion. I Mean you you dedicate a decent section of your of your report talking about Michael Binion because he is a bit of a very he's very influential figure in
00:24:01
Speaker
like oil and gas booster land and kind of like the conservative wing of the oil and gas industry, right?
00:24:09
Speaker
He started up the Modern Miracle Network. He was one of the facilitators of, and I think the people who was responsible for bringing together that all day meeting between the oil and gas industry and the Conservative Party of Canada's senior leadership that was reported on, I think by the Globe and Mail, was it who reported on that? And it was just, it was six months before the 2019 federal election, so they got
00:24:31
Speaker
and the oil industry got a full day meeting with a party which had a good chance of forming government.
00:24:44
Speaker
Exactly. And Quest Air Energy is owned by European banks. Just an FYI. You know, big Canadian success story, Suncor Energy, you know, took over Petro Canada, merged ostensibly. 79% of their shares are on Bloomberg terminal and 66% of them are foreign owned. It is a majority foreign owned company. I'm sorry, people. It is not Canadian, even though they own the Petro Canada
00:25:12
Speaker
Uh, gas stations. Yeah. Flying the maple leaf. Exactly. Right. Uh, tourmaline oil comp, I think through lean tourmaline oil corporation, I think is also worth pointing out from this table. Um, 53% of their shares are on Bloomberg terminal, 74% foreign owned. Mike Rose, the CEO of tourmaline is a big player, uh, in conservative politics and has splashed a lot of money around when it comes to a pro candy packs.
00:25:41
Speaker
and is just a big player, quite frankly, when it comes to conservative politics and funding kind of conservative politics in this province. And again, his oil company is majority foreknown. If you look at the Canadian companies, they're just tiny ones. They produce something like 3% of the total production.
00:26:05
Speaker
And most of them are privately held, so some of them can't even be positive that who owns it because they don't sell their shares publicly. But they're all tiny in their production. Yeah, with the exception of NAL, which is a bit of an intermediate, everyone is either a junior or right on the edge of being a junior.
00:26:29
Speaker
or is an organization like Perpetual Energy, which we've reported on before, which has its own legal troubles when it comes to oil and gas liabilities. No, yes, exactly right. The amount of companies that are majority Canadian owned or presumed to be majority Canadian owned, you've probably never heard of them unless you're a big oil and gas head. Two, their production is minuscule compared to the big boys.
00:26:57
Speaker
And this is where, you know, I'm really grateful for, um, you know, the fact that you said that you had access to a Bloomberg terminal because I don't have access to a Bloomberg terminal, nor do I have the kind of patience and the, the wherewithal to do it. But like, it's difficult because it costs $2,000 a month us to have access to it. So we were able to work with environmental group in the US and San Francisco who, uh, who, uh, had, they have X, they pay for the blue Bloomberg terminal and they did research for us.
00:27:28
Speaker
Well, that's brilliant. And, you know, just, just so glad that Michael Bloomberg made an extra $2,000 off of this, but again, well worth it for the analysis and the erasers that was stuck up, but you just can't do anything under capitalism without it benefiting a fucking ghoul. Yeah, right. And so again, I would encourage you to go through the report, especially the tables and through Gordon's methodology and look at it. And it's just like, look, it's, it's incontrovertible, like these,
00:27:56
Speaker
Folks, these organizations, these oil and gas companies are majority, foreign-owned, vast majority of them.
00:28:03
Speaker
But what did they have to do to distract from this reality? And this is where we get into the stuff that you were talking about just a few minutes ago, the Canadian energy citizens. And you frame it as social license became this very popular buzzword amongst both oil and gas and mining executives. And quite frankly, there's a lot of crossover between the two on a lot of the things that they do.
00:28:31
Speaker
And you know these Canada's energy energy industry took this idea of social license and you know instead of doing any number of other things they decided to embark on a massive
00:28:44
Speaker
Canada-wide, but with a special focus on Alberta, astroturfing campaign, or if not astroturfing, fully, fully all the way through, like astroturf light, right? Can you kind of walk us through what they got up to? Sure. Well, let's explain astroturf. So everybody knows that you put on a field when you don't have, you know, regular grass. So grass roots, they're grass roots organizations. An astroturf one, it attends as grass roots.
00:29:15
Speaker
So there are quite a number of organizations that the oil companies and CAP fund, and they have campaigns on social media. So the Canada's energy citizens is the one that is fully funded by CAP. And they actually admit it, but they still, you know,
00:29:43
Speaker
They still look like a citizen-based group. They have individual members. There's also Canada Action, which is not, it was actually founded by Cody Battershill, who was a real estate agent in Calgary. No connection to the Ireland industry, no. And it claims to be totally independent from the Ireland industry, but we found that there was
Funding & Lobbying Tactics
00:30:10
Speaker
kind of inadvertently, ARC Petroleum in one of its filings said that they gave 100,000, and there may be more. So there's quite a number of groups, maybe a dozen groups that are on the social media, active, Sanguer citizen-based, and being pro-oral industry.
00:30:38
Speaker
calling environmentalist traders and uncanadian and all that kind of thing. One of my favorite things is that the social media graphics and memes that Canada's energy citizens will put together.
00:30:52
Speaker
is that they'll like just have some numbers and some rhetoric or whatever. And then like as a source, they'll just have cap as a source. And it's like your cap, like you're quoting yourself in your own memes. It's very funny and self-referential. The other thing about Canada Action is that I actually went to high school with Cody Battershill. I grew up in Calgary, as did Cody.
00:31:15
Speaker
And he, I mean, never did I ever predict that, you know, I mean, I was a stone to depress teenager much like Cody was, but that he would eventually turn up in my life as an adult, as this unapologetic shill for the oil and gas company who, again, you're very correct, like tried to represent himself as just, I'm just a regular dude out here running rallies for the largest, most profitable industry in this country. But then,
00:31:45
Speaker
You peel back the onion a tiny little bit, and it's like, oh, $100,000 from some random company. Arc Resources is not a big player in the space. But if they can find $100,000 in their kitty for Cody Battershell, then I think it's very likely that other larger companies gave Cody Battershell and Canada Action very similar amounts or even more money.
00:32:10
Speaker
And, uh, and you even get into it. It's like, even if that never happened, like if, even if all they were doing is just buying, uh, you know, I love Canadian energy or I love Albert energy, like hoodies and stickers on in bulk, like they'd still subsidizing it. Right.
00:32:29
Speaker
And I think it is worthwhile to just take a minute to go through all of the organizations that do exist because there's more than you think. It's not just Canada's entity citizens and the Canada action. Let's just like find that in the report here. Let me just dig it up. You know, we've got Modern Miracle Network. We've got Suits and Boots. We've got Resource Works.
00:33:00
Speaker
What am I leaving out here? I'm just going off memory still. British Columbians for Prosperity, the Canadian Natural Resources Alliance, Pipeline Action, Oil Sands Action. Well, speaking of which, the guy who runs Oil Sands Action, there is a video on the internet of him zip-tying himself to the front door of the building that I work in because the Greenpeace used to have their storage space here.
00:33:29
Speaker
And, and he had this video slash live stream of him zip tying himself to the front door of a building. And then eventually he like, I think it was at like five o'clock on like a week night. And, uh, and I think everyone had left for the day. I mean, I never saw him, but like the building we work in is like a coworking space. There are like lawyers and lawyers offices here. There's even like a pipeline company here now, like a, like a analytics company. Um, it's just like a random bit of office space and downtown Edmonton. Uh, my fun experience with oil sands action.
00:33:59
Speaker
Oil, or maybe that's oil sand strong, the guy that I'm thinking of. Oil respect, which is a very funny concept, is the name of one of these oil, pro oil advocacy groups. These all claim to be grassroots organizations, but I have my doubts.
00:34:17
Speaker
Yes, I agree. And then, you know, the oil industry realized that they were losing the PR battle. I mean, you know, it was part of the braggadachee over bragging of the oil companies in Alberta in 2006. They stick a huge truck from the tar sands right in Washington, right by near the Capitol Hill.
00:34:45
Speaker
in a mall there just to show how big and great we are. And then of course that caught the attention of environmentalists and it led to a broad campaign to try and shut down the tar sands.
00:35:02
Speaker
Yes, and over and above the kind of wide-scale astroturfing or astroturf light work that the oil and gas industry has engaged in, they have also engaged in large-scale political action and doing their very best to capture government through their lobbying efforts. What did you discover when you looked into just how much work the oil and gas industry has done, as well as CAP,
00:35:29
Speaker
to do influence elections and to do political work. All of them doing all of this, of course, despite the fact that as you have laid out, they are majority foreign owned. Well, they certainly do lots of lobbying. There was a great study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2011 to 2018, so that overlapped both the Harper and Trudeau governments. There were over 11,000 meetings.
00:35:58
Speaker
at that time, which means it's like one a day with the oil company as a meeting. And the meetings are recorded. If it's a senior government person, you have to. But they're actually meeting with other people who are kind of middle level.
00:36:16
Speaker
as well, so even more than that. So there was in perpetual lobbying. And the purpose of lobbying is to flood the intellectual airwaves to present their point of view and for the person who's working in government to only hear that perspective. Then there was the CAP has registered as a third party.
00:36:45
Speaker
And they are allowed to spend a million dollars before in the pre-election period and a half a million dollars during the election period. And they've been doing that in both the 2019 and 2021 federal elections. They've also been doing massive advertising on television and radio on their campaigns to try and convince people that they're good guys and that they are the bedrock of the Canadian economy.
00:37:15
Speaker
all of those things. And of course, they had in the social media as well. So they're very active in trying to influence both elections, so voters and the government directly. And of course, I talked earlier about the secret committee that was set up. It was called Create the Path.
00:37:41
Speaker
at the beginning of COVID. And it did have the Minister Seamus O'Regan, the Natural Resources and Deputy Ministers from a bunch of different departments. And they did a lot of things to try and well, to block any kind of restrictions on their ability to make profits.
00:38:12
Speaker
Yes, and for some reason CAP has not registered as a third party advertiser in Alberta politics. I don't know how they've justified that to be honest. But yes, your point is well noted in regards to how much time and effort they've expended both in the federal election as a third party advertiser, as well as the lobbying efforts, which are, again, hard to even contemplate.
00:38:37
Speaker
the reality of that, of just how many full-time lobbyists they have, how often they are meeting with senior bureaucrats as well as elected officials, as well as the stuff that just doesn't get locked. These people, their job is to exist at receptions and fundraisers and to just simply always be there.
00:38:54
Speaker
at their shoulder, you know, around the coffee table at an event, you know, just like always reminding them that like we have our we have our political and material interests. Here's what they are. And you will constantly know what they are. And it's very funny, too, right? Like the cap and the kind of oil and gas industry is very overtly, even if they don't kind of say so, they're very overtly in favor of the Conservative Party of Canada.
00:39:23
Speaker
And they would much rather prefer them win than the liberals. But the funny thing is, is they get pretty much everything they fucking want out of the liberals as well. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. You know, they did have that. We talked earlier about that one day meeting, a whole day meeting with the conservatives, with Andrew Scheer when he was leader and his whole group. But they, you know, they continue to lobby the liberals. They have a tremendous influence on the liberals. I mean, you can see it. Why do we have carbon tax?
00:39:52
Speaker
which targets the consumers, but there has been almost no restriction on the production of oil and gas, and that is our biggest source of emissions. And that in itself shows the influence of big oil and big foreign oil.
00:40:10
Speaker
Exactly. It's again, read the report, it's incredible to even just contemplate how deeply entrenched in the halls of power the oil and gas industry is. And again, it is always hilarious when they cast themselves as these poor wittle victims because again, the largest, most profitable, most wealthy fucking industry in this country. And
00:40:37
Speaker
I think we're getting close to the end of our time here, but there is a question that I think is worth raising. You raised it in your report a little bit, right? It was largely the left and center-left that was kind of concerned with the whole issue of foreign ownership and foreign control as an existential threat to Canada. I was born in 1983. I'm 38 years old. I largely missed the debate around NAFTA and kind of the Mel Hertig era of Canadian economic nationalism.
00:41:07
Speaker
um but like what's old is new again and then now the conservative movement has essentially revived these ideas of economic nationalism to go after you know quote unquote foreign funded environmentalists uh
00:41:22
Speaker
But I worry that for someone like me, on the left, I don't much care if the oil companies are owned by Canadian or foreign capital. They're clearly working against me and everyone else who wants to survive as a species when it comes to climate change.
00:41:39
Speaker
When it comes to the left, is this framing of big foreign oil necessarily helpful? Do you think it's useful for the left just as a way to do public education and to engage the public on the issue? Is this framing of the oil and gas industry as big foreign oil, is it more rhetorical, useful as a rhetorical device than anything?
00:42:07
Speaker
You know, the climate crisis, the climate emergency we live in is a global one, obviously, but it doesn't mean the solutions are global. There is no world government. Where we have democracy, and of course, democracy is under threat at the moment in lots of places,
00:42:27
Speaker
it's at the national and local and regional levels. So the problems may be global, but it has to be national governments and provincial governments and city governments, et cetera, that are going to deal
Solutions & National Control
00:42:42
Speaker
with this. And so that's where democracy is. And so it matters that Canada has control over its own destiny and is not
00:42:52
Speaker
has influenced by big foreign money. I mean, look, we have our own problems with our own
00:43:00
Speaker
homegrown capitalists. But what big foreign money does is it gives a lot more power to those people, like Michael Binion we talked about. I mean, someone like him has perfect right as a Canadian citizen to be involved in Canadian debates. But having that foreign money allows him to have much more heft and much bigger voice than he would have.
00:43:27
Speaker
So I think that I'd like to see an economy that was responsible to the citizens, to the people. So, you know, we need both
00:43:40
Speaker
a popular national sovereignty and a sense that we're all humans and that we all have to support each other on the basis of humanity and support each other. But there's a difference between globalization and internationalization, internationalism. Globalization is about markets for corporations.
00:44:07
Speaker
What internationalism and nations are, that's where you can have democracy. I'm not saying there is. We don't have enough democracy anywhere. But if you're going to have democracy, that's where you have it.
00:44:22
Speaker
So, go ahead. I just wish we were as well connected to our comrades involved in struggle as international capital is connected to someone like the oil and gas industry. It's the scale of the money flowing around and like just how big and powerful they are is something that is again, like you just need to read the report and kind of try and understand it.
00:44:49
Speaker
It's, it's incredibly important. The economic nationalism question is just, it's just an interesting one. Like, how do you get people's attention, right? I think it's, it's a,
00:45:01
Speaker
which is a fundamental problem that every left-wing organization faces, any small independent policy shop or researcher or journalist faces, is how do you get the attention of the public? I think you've got something here. It's not necessarily like a deep structural issue that I have with it, but I think it's just worth raising the question.
00:45:22
Speaker
I also think that as we come to the end of our time here, that it's just worth reiterating that Canada is the bad actor here. When you compare Canada's emissions to its size of its population, we are absolutely one of the worst actors in the world. This has been exacerbated by everything that you talk about in your report.
00:45:49
Speaker
And so that's why I want to end our time here talking about, you know, essentially like walk us through your recommendations. How do we actually, what do you say we should be doing to solve this problem? Well, we have to curb the power of a big foreign oil and its influence on
00:46:09
Speaker
Canadian energy policy, climate policy. This is why we are the G7 bad boy, because it's the production of oil and gas that is the biggest source of emissions here. And they're allowed to have free hand. Well, so generally, it's important that people, the Canadians understand what big foreign oil is doing. But I have some specific things. In the 2016 US presidential election, there was a lot of talk about Russian meddling.
00:46:37
Speaker
And so in response to that, and the sense of, OK, we shouldn't have any kind of foreign meddling in our elections, the Trudeau government passed the Elections Modernization Act. And it banned the foreign entities from spending money in Canadian elections. And I think that's a good thing. But what it did, it left a huge loophole
00:47:06
Speaker
So you get an oil corporation that's foreign-owned and that's headquartered abroad, they're banned. But if that foreign-owned corporation comes and sets up in Calgary,
00:47:20
Speaker
and calls the South Canadian, they're not banned. They're considered Canadian and it's absurd. Now I've been working with people in the United States and there was just a bill that was brought forward three days ago into the US House of Representatives banning foreign corporate influence to corporations from spending it in elections. And this is brought up, this is brought by the Democratic members of the House of Reps.
00:47:50
Speaker
So anyways, so what I would like to do is to close the loophole that we have in Canada. So define foreign influenced in the following way. And I actually have taken this from the ideas of my American colleagues. If this is a threshold, if a foreign influence to a corporation is one that has 5% of a foreign government shareholder,
00:48:19
Speaker
20% of a single non-government foreign shareholder, or 50% total foreign ownership. So what we're saying is that the act should be amended to include those foreign influence corporations according to those specials. So we also want to prohibit foreign influence corporations from funding through membership
00:48:47
Speaker
to use in other ways, political interventions of lobbying like CAP. So if a group like CAP gets most of its funding as foreign funding, it should not be able to intervene in Canadian politics. We should also restrict further the maximum
00:49:06
Speaker
allowable individual political donations. So for example, Alberta, when the NDP was in power, put a cap on individual, sorry, banned corporate funding and union funding. And then they put a cap on what an individual donation was, but that was $4,000. The Kenny government is upped that a bit.
00:49:32
Speaker
What we found was that the oil companies found ways to use those individuals. So somebody who owns an oil company will do the maximum $4,000, you know, and all of this money went to parties, you know, either mainly on the right side, none went to the NDP.
00:49:50
Speaker
But if the owner would reach the limit, they would give the money to his spouse, who would give the money maybe to kids. So the money did find its way in, and we've got to block some of those loopholes. Well, we should also pass legislation that empowers Elections Canada to prohibit groups from making deceptive representations
00:50:15
Speaker
the purpose of promoting a political party, you know, in much the way that the consumer protection acts to do that.
00:50:30
Speaker
The whole purpose of this is that we're in a climate emergency and the big foreign oil is perhaps the biggest blockade to us really doing something in this country. And so that's why it's very important that Canadians understand this and support the curbing of their power.
00:50:55
Speaker
Yes, it's important to realize for everyone to realize that oil and gas companies are not your friends. They are not providing jobs out of the goodness of their heart.
00:51:03
Speaker
If you read their literature and what they tell investors, it's all about share buybacks and dividends until they can just roll up the company and have it disappear like a fart in the wind. They are not here to provide jobs out of the goodness of their heart. Everything they do is motivated by the profit motive and by, again, meeting the fiduciary duty that they have to their shareholders, which are majority foreign owned.
00:51:31
Speaker
And if you want to read all of Gordon's recommendations, again, we will link to the report in the show notes. It is absolutely essential reading. And just a funny little thing to end on, too, which is that recently, Alberta's Justice Minister Casey Medoo introduced and passed Bill 81 and contained within that bill.
00:51:55
Speaker
is a language that would ban foreign election advertising donations in provincial politics. Which, you know, if you're looking for a way to get attention on this, Gordon, you might want to just go after this and say, hey, based on your new law, CAP is not allowed to advertise anymore or to do a little political or election advertising in this province anymore. Because again, CAP is a majority foreign owned organization.
00:52:25
Speaker
But Gordon, I want to thank you for coming on the show. I want to thank you for the report. What's the best way people can follow along with your work? Well, you can go to my website. It's www.gordonalaxer.com. So www.gordonalaxer.com.
00:52:48
Speaker
You can also go, the Council of Canadians was a co-publisher of this report along with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. You can go into their website and you can find my report there.
00:53:04
Speaker
Yes, there's a lot of work that we have to do and we are going to win on this. The oil industry is a sunset industry and Albertans can do other things and must do other things if we're going to be part of the economy of the mid 21st century.
00:53:23
Speaker
Exactly. That's a fantastic place to leave it, Gordon. Thank you for your work. Folks, if you like this podcast, we would really appreciate it if you could join the 500 or so other folks who help keep this independent media project going, become a monthly recurring donor. It's very simple. There's a link in the show notes, or you can go to theprogressreport.ca slash patrons.
00:53:43
Speaker
It would be a fantastic Christmas gift for myself and Jim. Also, if you have any notes, thoughts, comments, things you think I need to hear, I am very easy to get ahold of. I am on Twitter at Duncan Kinney, and you can reach me by email at DuncanK at ProgressAberta.ca. Thanks again to Gordon-Lax for coming on. Thank you to Jim Story for editing the podcast. Thank you to Cosmic FamU Communist for our theme. Thank you for listening, and goodbye.