A LETTER TO JIM PATTISON. CORCORAN,

Dear Sir,

First of all, let me offer my sympathies over whatever new financial loss might be associated with your investment in Just Energy Group Inc., the Toronto-based green energy supply company that appears to be teetering (again) at $4 a share following the Texas ice storm. The Pattison Group once held 18 per cent of Just Energy shares, back when it was worth $200 a share. I'm sure you didn't become a multibillionaire by dabbling in too many losers like Just Energy, a company that specialized in bringing “energy-efficient solutions and renewable energy options to consumers.”

Anyway, that's not the real reason for this letter, although there is a connection of sorts. I just noticed that one of Just Energy's Texas subsidiaries, terrapass — a carbon offset and renewable energy specialist — just this week, in the midst of Texas market meltdown, joined a Houston-based organization with big environmental and social plans. “With the rapid pace of the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) movement,” said terrapass, “and calls by government, consumer, community and investor stakeholders for greater transparency, terrapass joins other thought-leaders to share learnings and advance ideas to help companies strengthen their ESG strategy and goals.”

This sort of leads to the real reason for this letter, a recent Financial Post feature story on how you came to be a climate comrade with David Suzuki and, by implication, a conscript into the burgeoning global ESG stakeholder capitalism movement.

You told the FP writer that you used to think that Suzuki “was really off base. But guys like me were off base,” especially on climate change. “I thought he was a radical and today (it looks like) he was a prophet.” With Suzuki as a prophet, you report that the Pattison Group — annual sales of $11 billion and fingers in eight economic sectors from coal to food — is now “changing gears as fast as practical to try to be more environmentally involved.”

The FP story went on to suggest — rightly, I think — that you have therefore aligned the Pattison Group with the global campaign led by your fellow billionaire, U.S. financial activist Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock Inc., the world's largest asset manager. Along with a couple of other big names, such as Mark Carney and Klaus Schwab, Fink wants corporations and the investment world to refocus on social and environmental issues such as climate change.

May I suggest, however, that jumping into ideological beds with radical leftist Suzuki and radical rightist Fink is a mistake.

David Suzuki: You refer to Suzuki as a “prophet,” which he has been, but a prophet of doom. The octogenarian has been preaching chaos and disaster for six decades, mostly spreading fear and panic via consistent and gross mischaracterization of the environment, science, and the world economy. In classic doomster mode on the CBC way back in 1970, Suzuki spun a fantastic story of possible genetic manipulation to force humans to adapt to climate change. Another CBC interview from 1972 has Suzuki warning about the possibility that white people might try to use genetics to eliminate race.

In 2007 FP columnist Peter Foster called Suzuki “the grand wizard of eco-fright,” a label he has lived up to year after year. In Suzuki's 2010 documentary, Force of Nature, the world is portrayed as on a collision course with growth. It's a fear-mongering argument Toronto academics Pierre Desrochers and Joanna Szurmak described in The Terrors of Dr. Suzuki as being driven by a “preposterously gloomy outlook, overwrought biological metaphors and misinterpreted ecological concepts.”

I could go on regarding Suzuki. The point is to suggest a more careful analysis of his work before setting him up as a corporate prophet, especially on climate. There's a new book out on climate change, the third edition of Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming's Unfinished Debate, that essentially demolishes every tenet of Suzuki's alarmist perspective. Environmental scientist Ian Clark at the University of Ottawa says the book “will leave readers with two conclusions: that our use of fossil fuels is remarkably benign and essential … and that we have been greatly misled by those entrusted for sound environmental policy.”

Regarding Larry Fink, there's also a new book out on the corporate movement he's leading to reform capitalism, described by one critic as an attempt to establish corporations as “the fourth branch of government.” The new book puts it more harshly: The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business.

The Dictatorship of Woke Capital tracks the origins of the ideological takeover of corporate purpose as seen by author Stephen R. Soukup. The trail is familiar, and noted occasionally in this space, tracking back to a fundamental ideological realization on the left that the people, the masses, are not ready for a radical revolution from the bottom, therefore it must be engineered from the top. The proletariat does not want a dictatorship; they want freedom and a better job — which means that ideologues seeking dictatorship must start at the top rather than the bottom. Today, the top means corporate executives.

Soukup describes Fink as a “fanatic,” which may be too harsh, although he and other corporate players in the woke capitalism camp certainly hold views that you, sir, might find disturbing.

But I now leave it in your court with the suggestion that you review your position on the new woke corporate capitalism and take another look at “the prophet.”

Sincerely,

Terence Corcoran