It’s the same old tar sands campaigners
The Tim Hortons vs. Enbridge tweet war was started by SumOfUs, funded by the Tides Foundation
Hardly a week goes by without a coup by the Tar Sands Campaign. The latest win is courtesy of SumOfUs, the group that pressured Tim Hortons into pulling its ads for Enbridge, a pipeline company that transports Alberta oil across North America.
The Tar Sands Campaign was launched in 2008 by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Tides Foundation (“Tides”) and other U.S. foundations with the objective of branding Alberta oil as the poster child of “dirty fuel.”
Tim Hortons’s capitulation seemed out of the blue, but it wasn’t. A week earlier, SumOfUs had begun petitioning Timmy’s to pull its Enbridge ads. Within a week, there were thousands of signatures, or so we were told. Not real signatures, only online ones.
SumOfUs was no stranger to Tim Hortons. In 2012, SumOfUs went after the company for its pork purchasing policy, objecting to gestation crates for pregnant pigs. Last year, SumOfUs took a run at Timmy’s for using palm oil from Indonesia.
Calling itself, “a global online community of consumers, investors, and workers holding corporations accountable and pushing the global economy in the direction of equity, sustainability and justice,” SumOfUs — as part of the Tar Sands Campaign — is a well-heeled international effort 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.”
Since 2008, Tides has paid at least $28 million to 75 Canadian First Nations and environmental groups involved in the Tar Sands Campaign.
Coast to coast to coast, the major organizations that are part of the antipipeline campaign are funded by Tides, including the Council of Canadians, the Tseiul-Waututh, the Wet’suwet’en, Art Sterritt’s Great Bear Initiative, the Pembina Institute, Equiterre, the Sierra Club, Forest Ethics, Lead Now, Idle No More, the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, and SumOfUs.
The Tar Sands Campaign’s original strategy paper, written back in 2008 by Michael Marx, says that this 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.”
“We need to generate a great deal of media attention on the shortcomings and risks associated with tar sands oil development and consumption,” says the Tar Sands Campaign’s strategy. That’s what SumOfUs just did. “SumOfUs is funded entirely by donations from thousands of members across the globe,” its website says. Not exactly. Since it began in 2011, SumOfUs 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.
In 2012, its first full year, SumOfUs reported two projects: $43,900 to support striking Wal-Mart workers and $50,000 for the Keystone XL campaign. For 2013, SumOfUs reported $1.4 million in expenses, including an unspecified amount to support crowdfunding ads for Washington D.C., policymakers on the impact of “massive tar sands oil spills in the U.S.”
SumOfUs was also the largest single donor in PullTogether’s first round of fundraising for First Nations legal challenges against Enbridge. SumOfUs contributed $40,000 according to PullTogether’s website.
In another recent episode in the Tar Sands Campaign, Vancouver’s mayor collaborated with Living Oceans Society and the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation in publicizing a study on the risks associ- ated with Kinder Morgan’s proposal to expand the TransMountain pipeline. The study found that a large oil spill would kill up to 500,000 birds and expose one million people to toxic air emissions. Mayor Gregor Robertson concluded that the impacts of the TransMountain expansion could be “disastrous.” No mention of all the precautions taken to avoid such a disaster.
“We can’t put a price on our children,” said Reuben George, speaking for the Tsleil-Waututh.
Most of the media echoed the city’s press release, but not Blair King, a chemist and blogger based in Langley, B.C. King found that the study attributed the toxicity of benzene to a mixture that was not pure benzene, thereby wildly overstating the risk of air emissions that could occur in the event of an oil spill. But by the time King had figured that out, the media had moved on.
As part of the Tar Sands Campaign, Living Oceans received a small grant from Tides for “exposing the threats to human health posed by a Kinder Morgan spill,” and that’s exactly what they did. As of 2014, the Tsleil-Waututh also received$79,368 in funding from Tides.
The success of the Tar Sands Campaign hinges on its ability to get “earned media,” publicity that is gained by getting into the news cycle other than by paid media (advertising). Earned media depends on the creativity and credibility of the activists and the invisibility of the money behind them.
Its no surprise that SumOfUs doesn’t let on that it is part of the Tar Sands Campaign. That’s the strategy. “The Coordination Center SHALL REMAIN INVISIBLE to the outside and to the extent possible, staff will be ‘purchased’ from engaged organizations,” says the Tar Sands Campaign strategy paper
Imagine Reuben George, grandson of the great Chief Dan George, being introduced in media interviews as part of the Rockefeller Brothers’s Tar Sands Campaign. That wouldn’t go over the same way.