From The Financial Post
Special to Financial Post Gwyn Morgan
Canadians watching Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election might be tempted to find comfort in their certainty that such foreign interference could never happen here.
Except it already has. And while the Russian government at least denies interfering in American political affairs, the perpetrators who meddled in Canadian elections have publicly trumpeted their success in devising and executing their plan aimed at helping elect who they wanted.
This story has all the elements of a fiction novel. Unfortunately it’s real
This story has all the elements of a fiction novel. Unfortunately it’s real. Piece by meticulously researched piece, B.C.-based independent researcher Vivian Krause spent almost 10 years exposing the story. Every detail has been corroborated, including with American and Canadian tax records, together with documents and statements from the perpetrators themselves.
The story begins in 2008, when a group of radical American anti-fossil-fuel NGOs created their “Tar Sands Campaign Strategy 2.1” designed explicitly “to landlock the Canadian oil sands by delaying or blocking the expansion or development of key pipelines.” A list of key strategic targets included: “educating and organizing First Nations to challenge construction of pipelines across their traditional territories” and bringing “multiple actions in Canadian federal and provincial courts.” A “raising the negatives” section includes recruiting celebrity spokes-persons such as Leonardo Di Caprio to “lend their brand to opponents of tar sands and generating a high negative media profile for tar sands oil.”
- Canadians are realizing foreign groups sabotaged our energy economy — for no good reason
- Joe Oliver: Yet more proof foreign radicals (yes, radicals) are sabotaging Canada’s economy
- ‘Eco-colonialism’: Rift grows between Indigenous leaders and activists
What would become a massively disruptive intrusion into Canadian affairs would take years and a large amount of money. Enter the Rockefeller Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. They, along with environmentalist charities, poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the U.S.-based Tides Foundation, a murky organization that provides cover as a legal laundering service that can funnel donations into activist groups, without revealing the source.
Independent researcher Vivian Krause uncovered evidence of a U.S. led green campaign to landlock Alberta oil. Shaughn Butts / Postmedia
Since both American and Canadian tax laws require charities to document receipt and disbursement of funds, Krause was able to gather irrefutable evidence that tens of millions of dollars were transferred from Tides U.S. to its Tides Canada affiliate. Moreover, Krause was able to obtain 70 covering letters showing the recipients and how they used the funds.
They went towards mobilizing First Nations against the fear of oil spills, including payments to help build “indigenous solidarity resistance to pipeline routes,” to maintain “opposition to oil tankers” and to “provide legal support for actions constraining tar sands development.” Funding also went to the Great Bear Initiative Society to build support for designating the so-called “Spirit Bear” habitat as a nature reserve.
Payments went to the Pembina Institute to “advance…the narrative that oil sands expansion is problematic”; to Greenpeace Canada “for events to show opposition to pipelines and tar sands expansion”; to the Living Oceans Society “to build opposition to the Kinder Morgan Pipeline”; and to Forest Ethics “to conduct education and outreach opposing the Kinder Morgan and Northern Gateway pipelines.”
But the American anti-oilsands funding effort didn’t stop at encouraging opposition to oil pipelines. The Victoria-based Dogwood Initiative received millions of dollars from Tides Canada to run get-out-the-vote campaigns in the 2017 B.C. provincial election, including deploying a throng of campaign workers in the riding of Green Party Leader Andrew Weaver. After his election, the B.C. government would be in the hands of an NDP/Green alliance bent on fighting the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.
Money was also funneled to campaign activists working to help the Liberals win the 2015 election. Vancouver-based Leadnow received directly and through the B.C.-based Sisu Institute more than $1 million from Tides Canada towards the objective of defeating then prime minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, which supported expanding the oil and gas industry. Leadnow claims its campaigners helped defeat Conservative candidates in 25 ridings.
If it weren’t for all that American funding directed at a campaign mobilizing First Nations and other anti-pipeline activists, the Liberals might not have been so successful in running against the Harper Conservatives; but then, without the election of an ideologically anti-oilsands Liberal government, the funding for the anti-oilsands campaign might not have been enough, either. The website of the Tar Sands Campaign boasted until recently a quote from team leader Michael Marx: “The controversy from the campaign contributed to political victories at the provincial and national level in 2015 and led to bold climate commitments by Canadian leaders.” After the CBC reported this past January on the campaign (which the National Post and Financial Post, with Krause’s help, had been reporting on for years) on The Weekly hosted by Wendy Mesley, Marx’s quote was taken off the campaign’s site. (The episode is very much worth watching.)
Read the rest of the story here.
HT/Bert K
This campaign was not just directed at Canada.
Science institutions like the AAAS President and Science mag editorial staff,and the NAS leadership ranks were targeted. Religious denominations like the US Episcopalian Church leity conventions were targeted with activists congregants. The American Bar Association leadership was targeted for placement of activists.
The membership of the above better wake up to what has happened while they slept.
The greatest irony of all of this is that this campaign greatly damaged Canada’s oil industry and economy, while not really helping Russia at all, primarily because Russia has too many internal economic problems to ever really kick their oil industry into high gear.
But you know who DID end up being helped? All of the shale drillers in Texas (and other spots in the US, but mainly Texas) who have been able to explode their production as market prices have held up, partly because Canadian production never got going the way it should have.
So thank you, Canada! You just allowed the Enviro’s to send a big chunk of the money that should have been yours down to Texas.
It will also lead to the breakup of Canada, as Alberta has no reason to be part of Canada if the Canadian government is crippling the Alberta economy. And if Alberta goes, SK and Manitoba will probably go with them.
I’d never considered that Canada too has “Fly-Over” Country. What about Nunavut and NWT? Would they join and form a mid-continent country excluding the very liberal coastal elites?
I’ve wondered about that. I could see them going either way, as I believe they receive more money from Ottawa than they pay, so they have an incentive to stay for the cash, but their culture has more in common with the Prairies.
We in Ontario would butt in as well. Justin can be prime minister of Quebec, if they want him…
This is all part of the UN global Agenda to wreak the western economies. The same thing is playing out in climate change. A lot of separate actors being funded and encouraged by Marxist organizations with much help from people like George Soros. The Democratic party in the US is the next to fall under the Communist spell. As for Canada, Trudeau is now behind in the polls because of Lav scam. If the Conservatives win in the autumn election they will cancel the carbon taxes
Good find on this report, CTM. I found myself wondering what their actual goal was, sincere dedication to “saving the planet” gave way to “create as much chaos as possible”. If you follow the money it appears to lead to the Tides Foundation, which is strongly influenced by the Rockefeller Foundation. Looney tunes running wild is a small problem compared to interfering in elections, it will be interesting to see where Canada goes with this. On another similar looney tunes the National Climate Day drew “tens of thousands” of students worldwide, whose signs said things like “In Favor of Climate”, which suggests these students were the remedial ones deliberatly let out of class.
Do you really imagine that these “climate warriors” are capable of knowing why they are doing it and where it will lead. They are sheep. They identify and left and think it is some kind of proof of allegiance to crap on about “carbon” as often as possible.
You should try to find the Guardian video of George Monbiot going head to head with a major oil exec in London about tar sands extraction. He said it produced twice the CO2 of other forms of extraction and when the exec said it was 5-10% more he had NOTHING to back up his claim. He had ZERO preparation just his silly little rave backpack and head full of internet claims.
He just made a total ass of himself while trying to be the ecological David taking on the Big Oil mogul.
Here it is …. except that the Guardian have pulled it ! Probably out of total embarrassment.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/video/2009/jan/06/george-monbiot-jeroen-van-de-veer
Is this the interview you are referring to?
I found this video. Monbiot is his usual unctuous self but he does not argue the CO2 point. Perhaps it is a different video or this one has been edited.
Why should “oil” companies try to be apologetic about extracting oil? They are not forcing their clients to buy their products, they are only producing what people buy.
Shell oil president said 15% more CO2.
You should realize that the reporter Monbiot is a Communist.
Ron Long (above): “[…] “tens of thousands” of students worldwide, whose signs said things like “In Favor of Climate” […]”
I’d like anyone holding such a sign to name one person – just one – who is against climate. Our young people have been dumbed down and indoctrinated to the point that they can’t recognize stupid when they are holding it in their own hands.
Lord only knows what was printed on the backs of those signs. “Remember to breathe” perhaps?
That’s like holding up a sign declaring that I’m in favor of the sun.
Meanwhile the sun continues on, completely oblivious to the fact that I’m in favor of it.
Not if you get sun burned. Don’t forget the old adage ‘Too much……………….bla bla bla
The Cold War was the USSR against the West. This looks like the West against itself. I would rather fight the ruskies.
Ethically a continuation of the Cold War from the Internal base (self negative). The end question is Who are the commanding figures of Green? A now used becoming evident “watermelon” green on the outside, Red on the inside. Has Green always been part of the Lenin/Stalin leverage apparatus?
Interestingly, the first really major government figure in the world behind what would become the “Environmental Movement” was the infamous Leader of the 3rd rikey-thingy. this is well documented – he wanted to bring back the “historic” forests and use the government to ban anyone else from using it. His government truly was the first “Green Government” in the world – no surprise that all of his “green” successors find it so easy to advocate the mass removal of any pesky humans that stand in their way.
Many of these groups were started and/or funded by the USSR to undermine the West. Since the USSR collapsed, they’ve been running on autopilot, or been taken over and funded by the 1%-ers.
So it’s really still the USSR against the West; the communist infection the USSR injected us decades ago with is still going because our cultural immune system has cultural AIDS.
Hardly surprising. This stuff has been going on in all Western countries for decades, if not far longer. At least there’s evidence and pray that we can use it in the corrupt courts of today.
Charities in the West have almost become completely synonymous with corruption. The majority are legal money laundering schemes. Charities hide the direct connections between racketeers and who/what they support and influence. Western politicians are mostly fulfilling the mandate of their financial supporters. Democracy is a farce.
http://presscore.ca/mccall-macbain-928000-gift-to-trudeau-represents-single-largest-lobbyist-bribery-scandal-in-canadian-history/
It is more correct to say that the charitable laws are being misused by those who are actually political organizations. Do not broad brush the thousands of legitimate charitable organizations with the tar of “charitable” in name only organizations.
Chit Not News you forgot lies incorporated
The campaign is not just against oil. The campaign is against all extraction of any natural resource. Conrad Black has a chilling piece on how members of the Trudeau cabinet have literally been trying to give Canada back to …
Absolutely sickening.
There is a goal of keeping the peons in their place, mostly led by trust-fund babies.
The Canadian courts (specifically the Supreme Court) are the real original activists behind this, with many decisions the last 40 years that lead up to all this. Perhaps the Delgamuukw v. British Columbia (1997) Decision is one that resonates the greatest that confirmed that aboriginal title entails rights to the land itself, not just the right to extract resources from it. Therein be the first shoe to drop.
Which sets up further later decisions and appellant courts to rule against recent issues like the Kinder Morgan pipeline, which is still an unsorted mess now. And in this one case where a company (KM) was ready and willing to spend the billions to get that approved pipeline built, it was just ruled against by the Federal Court of Appeal last fall for insufficient consultation with First Nations and transportation issues through Federal/Aboriginal waters off of coastal British Columbia. And guess who the Liberals and Justin Trudeau are going to try and sell this unbuilt pipeline to? It is absolutely criminal what is going on, both by recent outsiders such as Tides meddling in Canadian affairs, but also by the agents they installed in Canadian politics to wreck havoc on certain Provinces and companies including the extended national economy by extension.
commie: Mr. Black, in an otherwise informative article, demonstrated his ignorance of history and geology by referring to indigenous peoples of Canada as belonging to the Bronze Age. Probably, he didn’t want to insult them by calling them Stone Age peoples, which is of course what they were, but does sound a bit derogatory.
But there’s almost no tin, and there’s absolutely no easily mineable tin, in North America (or South America, unless I’m misinformed). So they got as far as making tools out of copper, which is commonly found in native form around Lake Superior and on the Arctic coast. Copper tools are pretty useless except as ornaments and status symbols, and certainly not as good as flint for cutting anything. So they never made it to the Bronze Age. It’s quite possible that the absence of tin blocked progress towards creating an industrial society in the Americas.
And I caught Conrad Black in a factual error!
IIRC the mainland Inuit found an iron meteorite on the tundra and used it to make iron knives, but there presumably wasn’t enough to use them as trade goods.
The Inuit are recent descendants of the Thule who had replaced the earlier Dorset peoples at the end of the Medieval Warm Period. They were really recent immigrants from Asia, and were already iron age peoples in an overcrowded Siberia when they rowed their boats across the Bearing Straight in search of iron and the Bowhead Whale. It is very clear that many of the Thule/Inuit were already much more advanced iron age workers with metal weapons and were able to wipe out and replace the earlier Dorset peoples that had been in the Arctic for 4000 years. The Thule Inuit were more advanced than say the Woodland/Plains Cree, who were really still rather technologically primitive as per the stone age. Yet they are given aboriginal status, even in Greenland to this very day, while the Vikings that had settled Iceland and Greenland are still European. They were contemporary explorers much the same as the early Norse, but were clearly recent Asian imigrants also. The looming LIA probably set them back into the stone age though, just as it destroyed the Norse in Greenland. They survived better, because they were hunters and gatherer’s, instead of more farmer like which the Norse were.
A remarkable new theory with growing support in the archaeological community proposes that the Bering Strait Thule experienced a serious iron shortage related to disruptions in East Asian trade routes after the rise of Ghengis Khan in the 13th century. Knowing of sources of iron in the Canadian Arctic, Thule migrants set off on a journey eastwards in search of this precious commodity, some say in a voyage of less than 3-5 years. The iron they eventually discovered would have been both meteoric (Cape York meteors) and European, because Norse Greenlanders were trading into the Eastern Canadian Arctic in their quest for walrus ivory and other Arctic luxury goods.
There used to be plenty of tin [SSn] in Bolivia.
Maybe it is all mines out – my primary education on this was, ahem, half a century ago, or more.
Autyo
tin [Sn]
Auto – Ooopps – my fault. Sorry.
And I miss ‘edit’ . . . .
Has been similar in Australia for years –
Stopping the Australian Coal Export Boom 24Oct2016
http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=4758
download the 2011 pdf Stopping the Australian Coal Export Boom
all laid out. No worries.
Is this AGENDA 21 ? We are not allowed affordable energy so many people die – just what they want ? It is happening across the world – at least the wealthy Western World so as to deplete the world of these pesky humans and give the world back to wild life !!!
Agenda 30 now. In reference to 2030 where the world is supposed to come to an end unless all the western democracies are dismantled. The UN is infiltrated with Communists. The EU is infiltrated with Communists including the president Juncker. The opposition party in the UK is infiltrated with Communists including their leader Jeremy Corbin who is actually the brother of Piers Corbin, the UK’s leading climate skeptic!!!!!!!!!!!. The Democratic party in the US is infiltrated with Communists.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Jeremy Corbyn’s private opinion of climate change is different from his public declarations – the CAGW meme is an easy vote winner amongst superficially intelligent middle class Labour voters.
When the whole thing finally falls apart, he (assuming still in some position of power – unlikely), like other politicians, will turn on the scientists, to deflect blame from their role. Its an easy decision for politicians to go with the flow rather than stand up and be counted for factual accuracy against powerful lobby groups.
How does it feel to get the Venezuela treatment, or especially the Ukraine treatment? Direct meddling using some chosen local group. Ask Canadian Foreign Minister Freeland about support for the Ukrainian Banderistas and the Venezuela pretender?
“A jewel exists in Canada’s province of Alberta more precious than all the oil in the province. This jewel is located in the Alberta Fusion Energy Program (AFEP), affiliated with the Alberta Council of Technologies (ABCtech). ” http://canadianpatriot.org/3444-2/
She is the one person in the government who understands Russia and knows first hand the evils of the Soviet era. She is smarter and more substantial than Trudeau Jr. and would be an excellent replacement for him.
” She is smarter and more substantial than Trudeau Jr.”
Who isn’t?
Trudeau probably has a better wardrobe, though.
To understand Freeland – see the strange case, the full dossier of that Rhodes Scholar. Possibly you may not have heard of evil of Stefan Bandera, the nazi collaborator of wwii, Freeland certainly has. She is one of 13 Canadians visa-banned by the Russian Federation for such activities.
It is laughably incredible that the openly nazi government in Kiev is the only trick the British elite have, besides of course Novichok, to attempt again the old Great Game.
The Soviets attempted genocide on the Ukrainians. Holodomor The fact that Ukrainians helped Germany is entirely forgivable. Same with Finland. And yes, guaranteed, Chrystia Freeland knows the history.
There was a strategic war game we used to play as teenagers, and no-one wanted to play Ukraine, because they almost always got steamrolled by the other players in the first turn. Ukraine has the misfortune to be in the middle between numerous countries that want to fight each other, so pretty much the only way to survive was to ally with the strongest one before it was too late.
Montani Semper Liberi
The folks who live on the plains, not so much …
Forgiving mass murder, genocide, by the Banderistas is the MSM narrative fed since Obama’s Nuland handed out cookies at Maidan. The Azov brigade in Kiev has turned the country into a bankrupt backwater, not the Russians. Meddling by British policy in Europe could indeed start Churchill’s operation unthinkable with thermonuclear weapons. Central Europe will not like Pershings rolling on the autobahn again no matter what the chocolate billionaire cooks up.
Freeland has very close ties to this Obama narrative.
Montani Semper Liberi
The folks who live on the plains, not so much …
https://www.google.com/search?q=us+indigenous+mountain+tribes&oq=us+indigenous+mountain+tribes&aqs=chrome..
The “Banderistas” gave you away Russian sock puppet….. The Ukrainians are sick of Moscow’s interference in their country, their culture and their affairs. Putin’s Russia invaded the Ukraine.
That’s why I buy Ukrainian Nemiroff vodka. Very smooth and no Russian collusion.
Another Obama ‘bot.
Interesting that the British dirty dossier used to attempt a coup against a duly elected President Trump came from Christopher Steel, MI6, Russia desk with years of Ukrainian activity. #
The entire world is sick of Neo-con interference from Ukraine to Venezuela following a British song-sheet, even to the point of trying to topple a US president!
Hubris precedes the fall of the British Empire.
How does it feel to get the Venezuela treatment….
I presume you refer to Havana showing Miraflores how to rig an election….?
Never heard of Elliot Abrams, convicted felon, Iran-Contra expert on regime change? Rubio and Havana connections?
I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for NPR or Pro Publica or PBS or the WaPo or Pravda (a/k/a NY Times) or CNN to report this.
If I were Russia and I wanted to disrupt the U.S. economy, I’d send money to Greenpeace, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Natural Resources Defense Council, World Wildlife Federation and the rest of the green mafiosos.
Then, I’d sit back and watch the various democracies self-destruct on the basis of hype and an evidence-free hypothesis combined with a scientifically illiterate and superstitious populace.
The Russians sent money and aid to Hillary. The best way to destroy America is to support Democrats.
‘Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election’
Mueller’s investigation is to turn attention away from Russian interference. It was all Hillary, all the time.
What is needed is to raise public awareness of: “The CO2 Cycle”, along the lines of “The Hydrological Cycle”. Produce videos, books, lectures, simple graphics etc showing how CO2 feeds plants which then provide oxygen for us to breathe and food for us to eat. Show how lots of CO2 fed the great forests; which then died and became peat and coal etc, gradually reducing the available CO2 and desertifying the planets until as we approached the point of no return for life (180ppm atmospheric CO2), in the very nick of time (at the eleventh hour, so to speak) a clever little ape saved life itself by teturnung CO2 to the atmosphere and re-greening the deserts. Present the tale mythologically: “Prometheus saves Gaia by giving Man fire”.
As life is dying
Prometheus saves Gaia
By giving Man fire
Er: ‘teturnung’ = ‘returning’
The media is not going to get upset over this because manipulating elections and collusion with foreigners is status quo around the world! The media is in collusion with the people perpetrating the collusion! The only reason ‘collusion’ suddenly became a terrible crime was because they were actively trying to bring down Trump. If Hillary Clinton won the election by colluding with foreign entities and powers, they would have bragged about how clever she was at cocktail parties, but they certainly would not have made it a news story.
I am sure no one is more surprised than the Mueller Investigation and the media that they didn’t find any evidence that Trump colluded with Russia, as the Swamp and the media are populated by people who do such things all the time! There is far more evidence of collusion amongst those trying to bring down Trump than there is with Trump and Russia.
For the left (which controls the media), interference with Canadian elections to stop oil pipelines is not a crime. It is a noble effort that deserves quiet praise. Their real problem now is that they have convinced a lot of the sheeple that such things ARE criminal, and they may get “hoisted by their own petard!” That’s what happened in the ‘ME TOO’ movement, and could possible happen here, but not likely. The average person just doesn’t care that much about pipelines, one way or another.
Well, Canada is in complete control of their oil sands… They can elect to build their own pipeline to the sea if the U.S. is not willing to work with them. It’s called having the political will – and it’s why I am warming up to Trump, he seems to have the political will to fulfill his promises even with Congress doing everything they can to sabotage him.
To fix this special interest money, we need to remove the tax-free status of any NGO that gets into political activism. And not just the end NGO, but all the NGO’s upstream in the money flow. I guarantee when you threaten their money, they will stop interfering. Oh, and this needs to apply to religious organizations as well – you fund something political, you pay your taxes from then on. So any church offering “sanctuary” to illegal aliens loses their tax-free status, and suddenly there is a cost to their activism.
Not that any of this can happen – NGOs are a path to politically connected people to get rich.
“educating and organizing First Nations ” – LMAO. Yea right. More like “conning them to do stuff that isn’t in their best interest”. Here is hoping a lot of natives realize they’ve been had and get angry at those who’ve lied to them.
This will not end well for Canada.
The Liberals are economy destroyers. Canada is a small country that imports a great deal of goods and a country that is currently running a deficit at time when the world economy is strong.
Canada has a record large balance of trade issue (record 2.1 billion/month) as Canadian like to take a warm winter vacation.
There have been 70 billion dollars of cancelled energy projects in Canada due to the Liberal policies.
No pipeline space and CO2 taxes are the reason. What is the future for energy in Canada?
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-finance-department-projects-federal-deficits-until-2040/
The Liberal Party campaigned in 2015 on a pledge to run short-term deficits of no more than $10-billion a year before balancing the books in 2019. However actual deficits have come in around $19-billion a year over the past two years and Mr. Morneau’s latest five year fiscal plan did not include a timeline for when the deficit would be erased.
https://business.financialpost.com/commodities/energy/a-self-inflicted-wound-pipeline-delays-to-cost-canadian-economy-15-6b-in-2018-says-scotiabank
Lack of pipelines and massive discounts for Canadian heavy oil could cost the economy $15.6 billion this year, or three-fourths of a point from the country’s GDP, according to economists at Scotiabank.
“Reliance on the existing pipeline network and rail shipments to bring Canadian oil to market has a demonstrable impact on Canada’s well-being, with consequences that extend well beyond Alberta,” Scotiabank senior vice-president and chief economist Jean-Francois Perrault and commodity economist Rory Johnston wrote in a report released Tuesday.
Brings to mind the Mexican oil baron who owns the majority of the New York Times.
Why would these NGO’s be funding the shutdown of the oil sand’s, couldn’t have anything to do with keeping more oil off the market and keeping up world prices could it. Not that the NGO’s in question don’t own oil stock themselves. Oh wait…
It’s alright! Canadians are a Stupid People
Being in more Refugees. They will Fix it!
All of this could be avoided were people more skeptical, and capable of doing minimal research. Alas the human race is made up of lazy idiots who organize their own imprisonment.
Canada needs a yellow vest movement, in order to save what is left, of its economy and sovereignty. Good luck… you will need it. GK
I’ve often wondered about the special level of hostility that the “environmental” community has for the Athabasca oil sands (“tar sands” “oil sands” “bitumen deposits” are all synonyms). It seems, somehow, totally out of proportion to the small contribution they make to global oil production. But when you reflect, it’s perhaps not so strange that the oil sands are the target of such hate-filled attacks by the green industry. Partly because they are vulnerable to bad publicity:
(1) They are ugly. Big holes in the ground with black sticky stuff in them.
(2) You see them from space. The past and current operations, including pits, stripped areas, roadways and tailings ponds, cover about 1,200 km² (about the same area as greater Montreal, or the greater Vancouver urban area). Not like oil or gas wells that have such small footprints.
Both of these “photogenic” features will fade over time as in-situ extraction takes over from mining. In-situ extraction now accounts for more than half of oil sands production (but do we ever hear a word of that from the green corner?)
(3) They do take a lot of energy to get them out of the ground, most of which is currently provided by natural gas. Hence the larger “carbon footprint” which can be hyped and exaggerated endlessly. The use of nuclear power to generate the vast amounts of steam used in extraction has been repeatedly discussed. But (of course) it hasn’t happened yet and probably never will, given the spineless rulers that we keep electing.
(4) I wonder, though, if the real reason they don’t like the tar sands is that they are really, really, really big. Reserves are said to be about 180 billion barrels, but this is just a fraction of the total resource. It could easily run into multi trillions of barrels. Most of the deposits haven’t been drilled off to the level required for reserves (anyone here heard about the oil sands in Saskatchewan?). And most of the resources are too deep to be mined so they will have to be developed by in-situ extraction.
Abundant energy for the future – that’s a message that is anathema to Big Green, and perhaps that’s the key driver for the relentless campaigns against the oil sands.
(5) Canada. Canada is generally regarded as a really nice country populated by really nice, well-mannered, nice, self-effacing, nice, polite, thoroughly nice people. Just listen to Bono. So, if they are saying bad things about Canada, it’s not because they are anti-Canadian (perish the thought, it’s an oxymoron, an impossibility), it must be because we are doing really, really bad things.
(6) Canada. Turns out it’s not such a nice country after all. We now learn that we (that is, those of use with predominantly European ancestry) are not “immigrants” but “settlers” and “colonists” who have practiced genocide and “cultural genocide” for centuries on the long-suffering indigenous population. Even those of us who are recent immigrants have become part of the long-standing scheme of europeanization (however, it’s important to note that this does not apply to immigrants from east Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, etc. most of whom are themselves “victims” of eurocentric imperialists).
The greens naturally picked up on all this and gravitated to developing a strategy to “educate” (and make generous payments to) selected members of selected First Nations, so that they can conflate the evils of colonialism with the evils of the oil industry, and present themselves as the last line of defence of the endangered ecosystem. Unfortunately, there’s enough truth in the tales of colonial abuses that it’s hard for many of us to spot the fallacy, and it really does make it hard to speak forthrightly to natives on this issue (because we’re Canadians and even though we’re colonizers and oppressors, we’re well mannered and self effacing colonizers and oppressors).
Venezuela also has oil sands (which don’t have bitumen, so they aren’t “tar sands”; they are also Miocene in age as opposed to our Cretaceous sands in Canada). So they are a bit more “conventional” and they have reserves of about 300 billion barrels with a total oil-in-place of 1.2 trillion barrels. Big Green doesn’t care about Venezuela; they don’t need to squander their smear campaigns on Venezuela. The Bolivarian Revolution is doing a truly spectacular job of dismantling its own oil industry, without any outside help. I hereby nominate President Maduro for the Nobel Peace Prize. He’s showing us how idyllic life in Canada will be, if we just open our eyes to the evils of fossil fuels that have been foisted on us against our will.
The Non-Profit Industrial Complex is huge and Global. It interferes in every country with hundreds of billions of dollars if not trillions at their disposal. Although many are based in the US they fund movements nationally and around the world with a global agenda in mind
Maybe the West could start spying on Russia.
Just a thought.
The entire Five Eyes , with all their budgets and high tech missed the announcement by Putin of the new weapons – they have no defense.
5 Eyes is too busy spying on their own citizens and subjects that Putin hilariously jujitsu’d them on Crimea, Syria, and hypersonics, nuclear drones.
Well ok, they saved the Skripals from Novichok in Salisbury, sez Ms May anyway.
Gerald Butts? Where have I heard that name before?
https://business.financialpost.com/opinion/boondoggle-how-ontarios-pursuit-of-renewable-energy-broke-the-provinces-electricity-system