‘War Room’ not credible, inquiry flawed, energy journalist tells SACPA

By Al Beeber on June 5, 2021.

LETHBRIDGE HERALDabeeber@lethbridgeherald.com

Al Beeber

Lethbridge Herald

abeeber@lethbridgeherald.com

The provincial government’s energy war woom has no credibility and an inquiry launched to examine campaigns aimed at oilsands development was flawed from the start, the Southern Alberta Council on Public Affairs was told Thursday.

Guest speaker for the online YoutTube session was energy journalist Markham Hislop, who spoke in-depth about the history of the war room, the work of the Steve Allan-led inquiry and the reliance by the UCP government on the research of controversial B.C. writer Vivian Krause.

“It’s a real complex story; it’s an onion with a lot of layers,” Hislop said in a preface to his talk.

The Canadian Energy Centre, also known as the energy war room, was part of a Jason Kenney campaign promise and was launched in December, 2019.

Its purpose, said Hislop was to “respond to misinformation about about Alberta oil and gas and pipeline issues.”

“Jason Kenny promised anytime anybody said anything incorrect about Alberta oil and gas the war room would leap into the fray and correct that information,” Hislop told the online audience.

The war room, however, hasn’t attracted a wide following outside of Alberta, he said.

While Hislop had 9,117 Twitter followers as of Friday morning, the war room, which has a $30 million annual budget, as of Friday morning had 5,834.

It has 162 YouTube subscribers, he said and while the war room has more than 54,000 likes on Facebook, only a handful of people comment.

“The takeaway from this is essentially the energy war room, aka the Canadian Energy Centre, is really preaching to the choir. There is no evidence it has done any of the things that it promised it would do and nor is there evidence it has moved Canadian public opinion, or Canadian public opinion. outside of Alberta.” Only a handful of people are commenting not the stories it is posting he, said.

He said this is partly due to numerous controversies that have damaged the war room’s credibility since the start, among them its logo which had to be redesigned three times because it had been copied.

Hislop said war room staff have also passed themselves off as journalists without saying who they represent “which is really unethical. . .very few of the articles they publish are credible,” he said.

“The war room has shot itself in the foot. Nobody has a good opinion of the war room except the premier and the people who work there.”

Hislop also had criticism for Allan’s inquiry, which started out with a budget of $2.5 million and has now reached $3.5 million. It’s also been given four extensions.

“The only visible work that it seems to have produced for that three-and-a-half million dollars is these three studies. . .these studies, I’ve skimmed them, I didn’t read them because they’re simply too painful are so poorly done and this is not just my opinion. . .they are atrocious, poorly written documents.”

“It’s the oddest public inquiry in the history of public inquiries because they’ve called no public meetings, they’ve called no public witnesses. There is nothing public about it,” Hislop said, adding he’s heard its head wants to leave because “he realizes he’s in over his head.”

The inquiry, he said, “was flawed from the very start.”

A number of environmental groups involved in tar sands campaign haven’t even been talked to by the inquiry, he said.

“Tides Canada, which has been frequently criticized and vilified in Alberta by the premier on Twitter, has never actually contributed to the tarsands campaign.” That group, which rebranded itself as MakeWay last year “builds partnerships and solutions to help nature and communities thrive together,” says its website.

The tar sands campaign, Hislop said “is the most ineffectual campaign in the history of environmental campaigns. It literally did nothing.”

Hislop also spoke of the role played by Krause, who has done research into the role of foreign environmental lobby groups.

That research, he said “kicked off the foreign funding activists narrative 10 years ago” while she was looking into salmon farming in B.C. She kept running across references to tar sands while going through reports and “that piqued her interest.”

She did an exhaustive study into how much money went into the tar sands campaign and “what she found was it was $40 million over the course of 10 years and so she began writing.

Some newspapers have given her exposure for her op-eds “where she articulated this conspiracy narrative that U.S. foundations were actively attacking the Alberta oilsands and the pipeline projects and it was a campaign they had cooked up and they had recruited Canadian environmental groups and First Nations .. . and they were essentially attacking the basis of the Alberta economy,” Hislop said.

The work of Krause, who Hislop calls the “poster child of this foreign-funded activist narrative” was also used as the basis of Stephen Harper’s CRA audits on charities that were involved in these things including some that were just alleged like Tides Canada.”

in 2017, he said there was basically a “civil war” in the oil and gas industry.

In 2014-15,”five oilsands CEOs were talking and met with five executive directors of environmental non-government organizations in Calgary ” he recalled

“Over a course of about a year, they hammered out an agreement, much of which ended up in Rachel Notley’s climate leadership plan that was announced in November of 2015. “

He said “a significant contingent” were angry because they thought those CEOs were negotiating on behalf of them and they weren’t authorized to do that.

This, Hislop said, “set up intense conflict within the Alberta oil patch.

“Two camps kind of went at it and eventually the conservative camp won and many of the oilsands CEOs left in that period of 2016-18, and were replaced by less progressive CEOs,” he said.

The side that won, he said, allied themselves with Jason Kenney, who was building support. In 2018, conservatives were gearing up for the 2019 election and while coming up with their political strategy “glommed onto Vivian Krause’s foreign funded activist narrative.”

During the election campaign, Hislop said, foreign-funded activism “was a huge part of the Kenney narrative and Vivian Krause was trotted out all the time.”

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