Krause leads the fight against Americans who have landlocked the oilsands
It’s not often that powerful American interests are completely open about their success at thwarting a foreign economy, but that’s what happened a year ago when Michael Marx talked up his achievements.
In a post on his CorpEthics. org website, Marx trumpeted the success of the 10-year campaign to throttle Alberta oilsands production, saying: “From the very beginning, the campaign strategy was to land-lock the tar sands so their crude could not reach the international market where it could fetch a high price per barrel. This meant national and grassroots organizing to block all proposed pipelines.”
Who is Marx? He’s the executive director of Corporate Ethics and the man who in 2008 co-ordinated two major American charitable foundations, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and The Tides Foundation, in their anti-oilsands fight. The campaign has since supplied tens of millions in U.S. dollars to groups such as Greenpeace Canada, Idle No More, Leadnow, Living Oceans Society, the Pembina Institute, the Sierra Club, the World Wildlife Fund Canada and various First Nations to battle against the oilsands.
I put in a call to Marx to ask him about this campaign, but have yet to hear back.
You have to give this campaign credit. Talk about interference in a foreign economy!
The lack of pipeline capacity is now costing the Canadian economy as much as $100 billion per year, Tim McMillan, CEO of the Canadian Oil Producers has said.
The fact we’ve let this happen speaks of our poor industrial vision and weak commitment to Canadian resources, but at least we’re now waking up to what these American foundations have been doing, though only because of the dogged work of Fair Questions blogger Vivian Krause, a researcher based in Vancouver.
Krause’s name has shot to prominence in the past year, with her work regularly mentioned by United Conservative Party leader Jason Kenney. But she is an unlikely oilsands champion. The daughter of two B.C. teachers, she studied food sciences at McGill before working for 12 years as frontline United Nations worker and diplomat in the slums of Guatemala, and then in Jakarta, Indonesia.
But she worked a few years in the salmon farming industry and came to see how U.S. charitable foundation money can go to Canadian activists, in order to sway public opinion against a local industry.
It was during her research into how U.S. foundations spend their money that she found a reference in 2010 to one major foundation funding a “Tar Sands Campaign.”
Krause estimates that as much as US$90 million in the last decade has gone to Canadian groups to fight the oilsands and pipelines.
Of course, activists like Marx will say the oilsands pose a serious threat to the climate and also require the destruction of huge quantities of land to mine the oil. But Krause points out that there was no similar campaign to land-lock North Dakota or Texas oil, not that the American oil industry would have put up with such foreign meddling.
“We’ve been too complacent and too Canadian for too long,” Krause says. “We need to think like the Texans.”
Environmental groups have four broad goals, three of which are laudable, Krause says: to move to renewables, to promote energy efficiency and to promote energy security. “But the fourth goal is to keep Canadian oil out of the global oil market and that’s where I think we can say, ‘No.’ Because it’s not fair to bully any country out of the global market.”
Krause, an independent investigator who has averaged $40,000 a year for the last four years on speaking fees, raised $50,000 in individual donations this year to hire a Calgary law firm to look into the legality of the Tar Sands Campaign, and whether it was indeed charitable activity. She has since shared the law firm’s findings with Rachel Notley’s office.
When I ask the NDP if the government is considering Krause’s push for legal action against these U.S. foundations, cabinet spokesperson Mike McKinnon of the Ministry of Energy says: “Ms. Krause has been a tireless champion of our energy industry and we appreciate her thorough investigative work. We will continue to consider all options going forward, legal and otherwise, in our fight for market access and top dollar for our oil.”
Krause says Notley has the credibility to lead this effort. “I appreciate her approach. She’s measured. She’s firm. She’s not going to over-reach. I want a measured piece of litigation, a nice Canadian, ‘Please stop landlocking our crude.’ “
Sounds like a plan. About 10 years too late. But still a plan.