Opinion: Anti-oil campaign funding murky
Invisible: U.S. foundations and Tides pour money into ‘earned media,’ protests and legal actions
By Vivian Krause, Special to the Vancouver Sun June 12, 2015
Pull Together, a project of the Sierra Club of B.C., the Raven Trust and First Nations against Enbridge, today begins its “Week to End Enbridge.”
This is the latest move in The Tar Sands Campaign, the funding juggernaut behind the scenes of the movement against pipelines and tankers.
Launched in 2008 by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Tides Foundation, The Tar Sands Campaign aims to stop the transport and export of Alberta oil by pipeline, tanker and by rail. Over the past five years, Tides has paid at least $28 million to 75 First Nations and environmental groups involved in this campaign.
In Pull Together’s first round of raising funds, the single largest donor was SumOfUs, a New York-based group that contributed $40,000, according to PullTogether’s website. SumOfUs is also the group that recently pressured Tim Horton’s to stop running Enbridge ads.
“SumOfUs is funded entirely by donations from thousands of members across the globe,” its website says. Not quite. Since SumOfUs began in 2011, it has received at least $815,000 from Tides and the New Organizing Institute which is also heavily funded by Tides. China Brotsky, who was employed by Tides for 20 years, is now the Director of Operations at SumOfUs.
Back in 2010, the Tar Sands Campaign was discovered only because Tides reported payments to dozens of environmental group in its U.S. tax returns, publicly available documents. But little was known about what the campaign entailed until its original strategy paper, written in 2008 by Corporate Ethics International, was posted online.
According to the original strategy paper, the Tar Sands Campaign aims to sway investment capital away from Canada and tarnish the appeal of Alberta oil by generating a “highly negative media profile” and a “steady drumbeat of bad press” in order to brand Alberta oil as the “poster child” of dirty fuel.
“We need to generate a great deal of media attention on the shortcomings and risks associated with tar sands oil development and consumption,” the strategy paper reads. That’s exactly what First Nations and environmental groups have been doing.
The Tar Sands Campaign aims to embarrass Canada, weaken the Alberta government and “reduce the attractiveness of the Alberta oil industry for the companies themselves, investors and financiers,” the strategy says.
Coast to coast to coast, the major organizations that are part of the anti-pipeline campaign are or have been partly funded by Tides, including the Council of Canadians, the Tsleil-Waututh, the Wet’suwet’en, the Great Bear Initiative, World Wildlife Fund Canada, the Pembina Institute, the Sierra Club, Forest Ethics, Lead Now, Idle No More, the Western Canada Wilderness Committee and SumOfUs.
Living Oceans Society and the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation recently collaborated with the city of Vancouver on a study of the risks associated with Kinder Morgan’s proposal to expand the TransMountain pipeline. The study estimated a large oil spill would expose one million people to toxic air emissions. Mayor Gregor Robertson concluded the effects of the TransMountain expansion could be “disastrous.”
“We can’t put a price on our children,” said Reuben George, speaking for the Tsleil-Waututh.
None of the media critiqued the study but Blair King did. A chemist and blogger based in Langley, King found that in making its estimations, the study had attributed the toxicity of benzene to a mixture that was not pure benzene, thereby wildly overstating the danger of emissions that would be associated with an oil spill.
Living Oceans Society has received $274,000 (2010-14) from Tides, including a small grant specifically for “exposing the threats to human health posed by a Kinder Morgan spill,” which is what it just did, or tried to. The Tsleil-Waututh are also funded by Tides, and were paid $79,368 last year.
When environmental risks assessments are funded and publicized by groups with an agenda, such as the Tar Sands Campaign, this needs to be out in the open.
Building pipelines is about breaking the U.S. monopoly on Canadian oil. Without Northern Gateway and Energy East, Canadian oil producers are forced to sell into the U.S. because that’s the only place large volumes of oil can be delivered now.
The U.S. has Canada over a barrel and it’s costing Canada billions in lost revenue and royalties because we aren’t receiving global prices for our oil.
By exaggerating environmental risks, generating bad press and taking legal action, environmental and First Nations groups can stall pipeline construction indefinitely.
The success of the Tar Sands Campaign hinges on its ability to generate “earned media,” publicity that is gained by making it into the news cycle. Earned media depends on the creativity and credibility of the activists and the invisibility of the money behind them.
It’s no surprise First Nations and environmental groups don’t let on about their involvement in the Tar Sands Campaign nor their funding from Tides. That’s part of the strategy.
The Tar Sands Campaign’s strategy paper explicitly says, “The co-ordination centre shall remain invisible to the outside and to the extent possible, staff will be ‘purchased’ from engaged organizations.”
U.S. tax returns and other documents show The Sierra Club of B.C. has been paid at least $99,000 (2012-14) by Tides, including funds earmarked “to stop the Enbridge and Kinder Morgan pipelines, including working with First Nations.”
Sierra Club reported in its Canadian tax returns for 2013 it received zero foreign funding for political activity but has since acknowledged that its tax return was filed incorrectly.
Tides also paid $373,835 (2009-14) to the Great Bear Initiative Society, led by Art Sterritt. That included funds specifically earmarked for responding to the media.
Imagine Sterritt or Reuben George, grandson of the great Chief Dan George, being introduced in media coverage as part of the Rockefeller Brothers’s Tar Sands Campaign. That wouldn’t go over the same way.
Vivian Krause is a Vancouver researcher and writer.
