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Keith Stewart (Courtesy Green Peace Canada)
The two big items in today’s national news are intimately connected. In Halifax, Alberta Premier Alison Redford’s push for a “national” energy strategy that is really all about getting new tar sands pipelines is being rejected by B.C. Premier Christy Clark.
And in Ottawa, the RCMP has announced that they are charging one of Prime Minister Harper’s former top advisors, Bruce Carson, with influence peddling.
What hasn’t received much attention, however, was the key role that Bruce Carson played in quarterbacking the push for a national energy strategy on behalf of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and (by extension) both the Government of Alberta and the Harper government.
At Greenpeace, we were raising flags about Carson’s role in pushing for a tar sands-led national energy strategy before and after the scandal that sidelined him. We also noted that his efforts began to bear fruit at last year’s meeting of energy ministers in Kananaskis, but were ultimately blocked in a way that may explain the Harper government’s fury with the Tides Foundation.
Carson worked closely with the oil industry to influence federal and provincial energy policy.
Carson left the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) to take up a position as Executive Director of the Canada School for Energy and Environment, which was created by a $15 million grant from the federal government that Carson had been lobbied on while at the PMO.
Once there, Carson worked closely with the oil industry to influence federal and provincial energy policy shortly, in spite of the five-year prohibition on lobbying under the Federal Accountability Act.
Yet despite the questionable legality of these efforts, documents obtained under Access to Information legislation show that Carson’s work was actively encouraged at the highest levels of the civil service and financed by federal taxpayers.
Carson set up conferences, met regularly with key officials from the oil industry as well as the federal and provincial governments, authored papers for the oil industry, and even presented EPIC’s ideas directly to politicians.
One of his more notable efforts involved setting up and co-chairing the Energy Policy Institute of Canada (EPIC) as a lobbying vehicle for the oil industry, whose “sole purpose is to develop a comprehensive, pan-Canadian approach to energy which will provide the foundation for recommendations to federal, provincial, and territorial government authorities responsible for energy and environment policy.”
Carson set up conferences, met regularly with key officials from the oil industry as well as the federal and provincial governments, authored papers for the oil industry, and even presented EPIC’s ideas directly to politicians.
Carson’s involvement with these various initiatives formally ended after he became the subject of an RCMP investigation into illegal lobbying, but EPIC went on to present its recommendations to federal and provincial ministers in July 2011, at a meeting that Carson had spent more than a year organizing.
Those recommendations centred on a national energy strategy that would provide the justification for the infrastructure required to rapidly expand the tar sands, including “building a new pipeline infrastructure to the West Coast to open up export markets around the Pacific Rim.”
Keith Stewart is the Climate and Energy Campaign Coordinator for Greenpeace Canada.
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