It’s official now: Calgary Herald political columnist Don Braid has breathlessly reported, to paraphrase the headline on the column he posted yesterday, that it was the threat of federal fines that pushed the Alberta Energy War Room into the government fold.
The subhead on Mr. Braid’s story continued: “The main reason is federal Bill C-59, which has passed third reading in the House of Commons and is now before the Senate.”
Well, folks, remember where you heard it first.
As I wrote on June 5 about the United Conservative Party Government’s reaction to the risk posed by the truth-in-advertising requirement to be added to the Competition Act if the Fall Economic Statement Implementation Act, 2023, passes, the threat presented to fossil fuel industry bosses is actually quite small.
Just the same, I wrote, the danger was greater for the three directors of the Canadian Energy Centre Ltd. as Jason Kenney’s Alberta Energy War Room was officially known. After all, unlike oil and gas companies, the principal business of the War Room was propaganda, and propaganda about petroleum extraction inevitably tends toward greenwashing.
The three directors, of course, are Brian Jean, Rebecca Schulz, and Mickey Amery, the UCP Government’s ministers of energy, environment, and justice.
Now, Premier Danielle Smith was speaking a small untruth when she claimed, in a story published in the same day’s edition of The Herald, that the War Room was folded into the Intergovernmental Relations Department, in the reporter’s words, “because she believes the province should lead the fight to message for the oil and gas industry.”
She’s right, of course, that the government should depend on “good, credible research and data on the state of our industry” and leave the fighting to the political level.
She’s pulling our legs, though, if she’s pretending the War Room was set up by her predecessor, Mr. Kenney, to deliver good, credible research.
From the get-go, it was intended as a propaganda house, set up as a private corporation to hide what it was doing with all the money funneled through it from the provincial government’s continuing carbon tax, the so-called Technology Innovation and Emissions Reduction regulation.
This naturally raised suspicions, which have never been fully put to rest because of the War Room’s built-in lack of transparency, that it was in effect a money laundering scheme to transfer public funds to political purposes. What was crystal clear, though, is that its purpose was greenwashing – and Ottawa is now moving to put an anti-greenwashing provision into law.
As for Mr. Braid’s column, while he accurately identifies the government’s panicky concern about the War Room’s misleading advertising, he adopts whole cloth the UCP’s colourful doomsday interpretation of the small change to the Competition Act.
Mr. Braid is peddling the government’s nonsense when he claims, “Bill C-59 is appallingly undemocratic and an affront to free speech.” It is nothing of the sort.
He goes on to call the Competition Bureau a “kangaroo court,” and to raise the appalling prospect for the industry of having to tell the truth in its advertising. “Under the federal bill, industry will have to prove their claims are correct. The onus is on them, not the complainant.”
As noted in my June 5 story, an oil and gas corporation and its executives would have to work very hard indeed to qualify for jail time, as Ms. Schulz misleadingly claimed they could in her May 29 statement.
That statement conflated NDP Charlie Angus’s private member’s bill, which will die on the Order paper, and the new greenwashing provision added as an amendment to the Competition Act.
The former did include provisions for jail sentences. The latter does not, except in provisions that are already in the Competition Act, and which can only come into effect when someone engaged in violating the act refuses to obey a court order to stop.
This is not clear from the May 29 statement, and since the minister and her staff had to know this was so, it is fair to conclude that their intention was to mislead the public.
Ms. Schulz’s statement “begins by talking about jail time referring to a different piece of proposed legislation, Bill C-372, An Act respecting fossil fuel advertising,” Ecojustice lawyer Tanya Jemec explained in an emailed response to a question.
“Bill C-372 was introduced by MP Angus in February 2024,” she said. “That bill does contain offences and punishment including the potential for imprisonment. That bill has completed first reading in the House of Commons but is ‘outside the order of precedence,’ which means it has not been selected for debate by the House. I.e., it is very unlikely to continue through Parliament and become law.”
“Ms. Schulz then goes on to criticize the proposed amendment of the Competition Act in Bill C-59 that would add to the deceptive marketing provisions in s. 74.01(1) (i.e., requiring certain environmental claims to be based on tests or other substantiation),” Ms. Jemec continued. “A court is not empowered to order imprisonment for violations of these deceptive marketing provisions.” (Emphasis added.)
“However, you are correct, that if a person contravenes a court order (except failure to pay an ordered fine), then there is the possibility of a fine or imprisonment (s. 66). It is useful to note that many federal and provincial laws provide for the possibility of jail time, but rarely does this occur, particularly for white collar crimes. It very much depends on the nature and seriousness of the offense.”
She added: “If a person has engaged in the offence of knowingly or recklessly making false or misleading representations (Competition Act, s. 52) imprisonment could also be ordered. (This is an existing provision in the Act and is known as a criminal offence, unlike s. 74.01 which is a civil offence and is of lower severity b/c the representation does not have to be knowing or reckless.)”
The Competition Act’s current provisions dealing with false or misleading offences are broad and not specifically about greenwashing, she said, “although conduct that is greenwashing could be found to be false or misleading.”
Ms. Jemec also noted that the Competition Act’s existing section about false and misleading representations does not require proof that the members of the public to whom misleading representations were made live in Canada. This compounds the problem for Canadian Energy Centre Ltd., of course, since so much of its advertising budget appears from the company’s annual report to have been spent in the United States and European Union.
According to Premier Smith’s remarks to the Global Energy Show in Calgary, as reported by the Herald, three War Room staffers will now be given good government jobs in the IGR Department.
As for Tom Olsen, the War Room’s $241,000-per-annum CEO, however, the news was not so good.
Mr. Olsen said in a statement on the LinkedIn resume site, which he may now find quite useful, that “I will be leaving with a three-month retirement allowance, as per my contract.”
Mr. Olsen, a former Calgary Herald reporter and later a communications staffer in Progressive Conservative premier Ed Stelmach’s office, ran unsuccessfully for the PCs in the 2019 provincial election in the Calgary-Buffalo riding. He was easily defeated by former NDP finance minister Joe Ceci. But as a former PC loyalist, he may not quite be Premier Smith’s cup of tea.
Perhaps he will now return to his musical career, previously a sideline, leading an “alt-country” band called Tom Olsen and the Wreckage that often played Conservative party and media hoedowns. Indeed, Mr. Olsen was scheduled to appear at the late premier Jim Prentice’s victory party on election night 2015. Alert readers will recall that the winner of the premier’s job that night was someone named Rachel Notley.
Finally, it is worth noting from Mr. Braid’s column that the UCP’s position appears now to be that Canadian Energy Centre Ltd. is a Crown corporation.
In its effort to inoculate the company against Freedom of Information searches in 2019, however, the Kenney government went to great lengths to claim that was not so.
Indeed, when Mr. Olsen referred to the company as a Crown corporation in a statement introducing the company on its website on Dec. 10, 2019, he was forced to issue a correction: “An earlier version of this column identified the Canadian Energy Centre as a Crown corporation. In fact, it is a provincial government corporation,” he wrote.
David. You have to really shorten up that url. FB just deleted my posting with it. Some BS, bogus reason given. (no need to post this). The same thing may happen if you post it as is.
Roger: I think FB is treating me as if I am a mainstream media news source, and hence under The Ban. You are not alone in this problem. The tech bros, while supposedly very, vert smart, actually seem quite stupid. DJC
Wow. Instead of continuing their endless whining about federal overreach, the UCP pull the plug on the War Room? But…but…but…how are they going to pay off TBA now?!?!?!
I’m sure the war room’s Keyboard Kommandos will still be busy on the comment pages.
Don Braid has shown his true colours virtually taking the UCP talking points lock, stock, and baggage. Can journalism get any lazier? The Journal is now obviously a party organ of the UPC.
$60,250 should be enough to cover expenses while Tom Olsen is getting the band back together. I had visions of him as Heather Locklear in Spin City, but now I’ll have to settle for the Blues Brothers at Alberta’s version of Bob’s Country Bunker. The convoyeurs at Lacombe are looking for some free acts willing to work for exposure at their Canada Day bash. He should check it out.
Maybe he and Charlie Angus – who has a punk rock band – should go on tour together …
Jerry: Stranger things have happened. DJC
Bwahaha!
“It’s 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark… and we’re wearing sunglasses.”
And once again I say, thank God for the Feds. I don’t look forward to seeing them fall to Poilievre.
DJC– re: pic from New York..
” deceptive”….No!
“Crystal clear “.
And a question– “the provincial government’s continuing carbon tax” ?
Are you saying that the Alberta government could have been giving the public tax rebates or credits to offset the price of fuel.
Another sleight of hand?
Oh, and just as a sidebar, for all those welders who are going to be laid off from JT’s pipeline building/cutting jobs; according to PP* you build homes, so the UCP will put you right to work to build, build, build, those homes.
(HoC today)….
Can I file a personal or class- action health lawsuit against him for inducing the “Blair” syndrome ? Asking for some friends.
Randi-lee: I’m not a lawyer. I can offer opinions on what things mean, but I can’t provide legal advice. DJC
The UCP is good at one thing and that is communications. So not surprisingly they conflate a proposed private bill unlikely to pass Federally with a government law and go on and on about jail time.
I doubt oil company executives who have good and well paid legal advisors are worried about this. No the target market of the UCP’s communications is generally the gullible, both their own supporters and those they hope to persuade.
An even better win for them is they now seem to have Braid parroting their talking points here. He used to be more independent thinking than say Rick Bell, but perhaps there was a deadline coming up and maybe he is slowing down.
It never made sense to me why the Alberta Government should pay for the energy industry’s advertising and public relations. This is in essence what the War Room was doing, but those companies are large profitable businesses that can certainly afford to promote and defend themselves.
So perhaps this is where Mr. Olson will end up, or back in some government department after his severance ends. Or perhaps he will have more time to pursue music gigs. The 2014 election night debacle surely wasn’t his fault, but Mr. Olsen does seem to have had an uncanny ability to end up in the middle of unfortunate events more than once.
Just a little nugget, while checking out the flooding in Florida—
>>>March 15th 2024<<articles
“Desantis, amid criticism, signs Florida bill ,making…”
—Also bans power generating wind turbines offshore or near the states lengthy coastline…..
” my hero” ___ sound familiar?
When was that moratorium announced?
Re: tidbits…
https://usnews.com>articles
( not sure what happened there)
Truth in advertising? How about some accountability from these climate doomsday cultists who have been predicting catastrophes like rising seas and melting ice caps for years now, none of which have come to fruition. You have to wonder if the average Joe and Jane out there have tuned out.
It’s okay, Ron. The severance package should keep you going for a few weeks.
What are you talking about ? BOTH OF THOSE THINGS ARE DEMONSTRABLY HAPPENING. In fact it’s a real problem in northern communities because a lot of them are having issues with permafrost not being perma anymore. Coastal cities all over the world are dealing with endemic flooding now, not in the coming future.
What you’re talking about, total society collapse and the ocean swallowing entire cities, that hasn’t happened yet, but we are maybe past but definitely approaching the tipping point where it will be locked into the not so distant future.
By the time that epoch arises most everyone reading this blog will have shuffled off their mortal coil, but we are likely the last people on earth with a chance to accomplish anything meaningful.
The future is unwritten, and ultimately unknowable, but your cynical attempt to manipulate the discourse around climate change, which is very much a settled issue isn’t compelling, and it’s something you should be ashamed of.
My day wouldn’t be complete without a good spanking from the blog’s ideological enforcer.
I certainly am ideologically a dialectical materialist, but there’s nothing ideological about melting permafrost pal, lying about climate change is about as convincing as the emperor is new clothes were at this point, but you do you: keep using ten dollar words you’re not sure of.
Does the week long carnage of deaths from the 2021 heat dome count as a tragedy for you or is it just spank material?
Acquaint yourself with the heat domes of 1911 and 1921 to name just a few. Been happening forever.
Best example of Poe’s law ever! Bravo!
Are you Ron “in” Mac as in Ft.Mac. or just another ostrich who denies anything provided by reputable climate scientists?
Speaking of reputable the 2022 Nobel Prize winner in physics John Clauser has gone on record saying he has some serious doubts that human made co2 has any effect on the climate.
Ronmac….
According to one of those “ordinary Joes *”– the reason that the ocean is rising is because there’s 10’s of thousands of shipping containers in the ocean—
*Ron Clark- Professional Freedom Advocate……
Enough said…(AFF)
And if you are serious about being enlightened about how much the ice caps are melting just Google maps of the Artic over the last 20 years, or glacier melt in BC. But somehow I don’t think you want to be educated— just like PP it’s easier to blather on disinformation and get sound bites, than finding out the facts and have no ‘talking’ points .
Dear Ron, Ronnie, Ronaruny, Ronmac,
Please take a look at your Kool-aid mixture, it may require adjustments. It’s distorting your perception and creating a reality that doesn’t exist.
Ken Kesey sends his regards.
The UCP treat the environment like it is a big joke. We won’t be laughing, once the irreparable damage is done.
David has provided an interesting analysis of Rebecca Schulz’s claims about the revisions to the Competition Act. Thanks, David, for pursuing Ecojustice lawyer Tanya Jamec for the clarification.
In the interest of precision, Ms. Jamec’s analysis is a bit wordy. If I can offer my own simplification, Rebecca Schulz had to resort to a lie in her efforts to generate outrage to legislation that will prevent her from lying.
Bob: Irony. DJC
I believe the term to best describe the war room retreating behind Smith’s skirts is, “Hoist with his own petard”. As for the directors, we should refrain from referring Schulz, Jean and Little Mickey as “The Three Stooges”. That would be a grievous insult to Curly, Larry, Moe, Shemp, Joe and Curly Joe.
Keep in mind Braid has to write these asinine columns. If post media fired him, who would hire him? Well, maybe he could be a roving reporter for Rebel Media like that other squalid nuisance, David Menzies.
JE: Speaking of a squalid come-down, you’ll recall that Kerry Diotte worked for a few weeks as a Rebel “reporter” after losing his safe Parliamentary seat to a New Democrat nobody had ever heard of until then. Now Kerry’s trying to get himself nominated for a rerun. If PP has any sense, he’ll tell him to pump sand. As for Braid, he’s 82. Maybe 83 by now. Surely he could apply for OAS if he and the Mrs. have insufficient retirement savings. DJC
Thus the reason Danielle Smith compared KD to Shannon Phillips when referring to police doing things they shouldn’t have done? Of course, KD was not a politician then, and therefore not a cabinet minister. “Bop With the Pope,” Cardinal Kerry. Don’t blow the amps this time.
Not that K-Boy needed to genuflect to Big Bitumen to have a good shot at winning power in 2019, such a submission already well understood by all, but leading a new party so recently born by shotgun-wedding hitherto fractious neolibertarian and paleo-Tory factions of Alberta’s diverse partisan right would reasonably want a surfeit of insurance. The foundered father of the united right thus spared no detail in getting his winning signets in a row after splashing down into provincial politics after the federal HarperCon government in which he was an influential cabinet minister was soundly defeated in 2015.
Task Number-One (not including Kenney drawing his MP salary until certain of a new one to jump to) was to finish destroying the two parties of the right which Danielle Smith had already fatally wounded by both her presence and absence. Next he bundled underarm reams from the tRumpublican playbook, sensibly playing to rural Albertans’ Texas North fantasy but, more importantly, demonstrating he could, just like tRump, cross any line of decorum, ethics or morals, and boldly cock a snook at the outrages so provoked—like recruiting United-We-Roll bikers and cheating to win the UCP party leadership. At whom was this performance mainly aimed? Why, Big Bitumen, naturally, because its own untruth in advertising only worked on the choir of petro-workers and not so much on the general Canadian congregation. And how did he acquire that surfeit of election-win insurance that he really didn’t need anyway? Of course he promised the real boss of Alberta a polemic, pro-petroleum-propaganda “war room” to counter attack those pesky anti-petro protesters, attractively bankrolled by taxpayers and handily at swan’s-wing-length from the mighty Moguls of the Albetarian Bitumen Mines so they wouldn’t have to take any flack, not even when a cuddly cartoon depiction of a Sasquatch turns a phalanx of freedom-loving, full-patch signets into a vicious lynch-mob.
As I advised at the time, once K-Boy obtained the premiership in 2017 he should have quickly and quietly buried the promised but legally-wobbly war room deep in the bowels of some ministry or other to die a completely forgettable death. But his recruits’ ginned passion for red meat (perhaps having no better petroleum policy to offer than his NDP predecessor’s—or whatever insecurity Kenney might have felt about pitting Bitumen apologetics against widely believed truths), he foolishly gave the war room a hi-viz profile by gnashing and lashing out against even a Walt Disney cartoon character.
Succeeding spectacularly at both profile-raising and looking foolish, K-boy doubled down with conspicuous political tactic by commissioning an war-room report which eventually doubled observers’ suspicion of partisan perfidy when the commissioner kept asking for deadline extensions, piquing curiosity exponentially until the nothing-burger that no evidence of foreign conspiracies was found against Alberta energy became instead an international embarrassment and the UCP’s energy policy a laughing stock. But it did precipitate the best political newspeak energy minister Sonya Savage ever mustered: it didn’t matter that no anti-Alberta-energy conspiracies could be found to rationalize the war room’s public cost, the report did discover that Albertans were hurting (because she said so) and that alone made the expense all worth it. Uh—Okaaaaaaay….
The debacle illustrates that it’s one thing to criticize government policy and propose alternatives from the Opposition benches, quite another thing once an Opposition party takes on the real responsibility of government. The war room was useful as an election campaign cookie because K-Boy knew his supporters considered it ‘fair’ that petro-truths be countered by untruths —just like many of them do that Creationism be given equal weight in high school science classes. He was clever to shield the war room from FOI requests by making it a “private company”, but too clever by half to invite his base to join him in gloating about it—a tRumpublican trait if ever there was one. (In fact, K-Boy took that page from BC Liberal leader Gordon Campbell who did the same thing with the publicly-owned ferry system by creating an ostensible “private” service contractor to manage the public service so’s to insulate it from public accountability despite the fact that the public owns nothing less than 100% of both the ferry fleet and this bogus “private” contractor. The similarity ends with purposes: Campbell’s plan was to bankrupt a public enterprise, K-Boy’s was not.)
The difference in difficulty between government responsibility and criticizing from the Opposition peanut-gallery was doubly illustrated by Kenny’s Covid policies which were so ham-handed they became his undoing: his radicalized base never cared where the red meat came from so Danielle Smith could easily help it give
Kenny the bum’s rush by entering the leadership race while beating on a tub of ivermectin/chloroquine pudding after the pandemic had substantially waned (it’s speculative that Smith would have made a worse hash of Covid than K-Boy did—but it was definitely a matter of luck, not skill, that Albertans never had to find out).
It’s ironic that Kenney loved to show off his political gamesmanship, particularly that gaming the political system afforded opportunities to thumb his nose at partisan rivals which never missed availing. His CV is impressive, having started his political career quite young —like his former CPC colleague Poilievre, except more toward the religious right and probably much more calculating—whence the K-Boy advanced quickly to federal cabinet minister. He forwent the race to replace Harper in order to seize the more immediate opportunity to show off his political chops in Alberta where the veteran ProgCon government of 44 years had just been whipped by the upstart NDP. Yet his partisan credentials proved unsatisfying once he attained the responsibility of power and ultimately nullified those chops when he tried some political stick-handling of basic epidemiological policy through the ultra-partisan, anti-vaxxer chauvinism he once encouraged.
And I always found it curious that such a political wonk failed to ditch the ultimately impolitic war-room campaign promise at the earliest opportunity. But, then, he had Covid on his mind.
(I have to take slight exception to DJC’s statement that the war room laundered public money for political purposes: I would rather say, for partisan purposes.)
Danielle Smith’s government is all about partisanship and none about politics. It’s too late to say folding the war room into the lost catacombs of bureaucracy is a shrewd political move: rather, her hand was forced and totally defensive in anticipation of the federal truth-in-advertising bill which is wending its way towards becoming law. Presumably it won’t be very long now before FOI requests reveal more knee-slappers about the ill-fated energy war room.
Where K-Boy sought to influence the hearts and minds of the general public, albeit with falsehoods about the bitumen industry, Smith has no concern in that department—no political concern—that is, because she hasn’t got a political bone in her head. Rather, she bought her insurance policy from one, single player: she promised the petro-industry which holds Alberta ransom a very handsome deal where taxpayers will cover the enormous cost of cleaning up petro-sites, abandoned wellheads, and tailings ponds on behalf of the giagantic, foreign-controlled industry that profits so handsomely from it. She didn’t have to sell this perfidious plan to the electorate partly because the Loyal Opposition omitted to attack it vigorously during last year’s election. Big Bitumen naturally gave her the thumbs-up.
Mendacity aside, Kenney’s belief that any Alberta premier is duty bound to live with the bitumen industry for the good of Albertans is not far-fetched. In contrast, Smith’s bogglingly generous deal to absolve industry from cleaning up its pollution completely nullifies the potential for bitumen to be better exploited for the public good.
Yeah, she won’t miss getting her digs in on Ottawa but otherwise the war room has little use for her. How on earth can any propaganda machine apologize for the giant cookie she gave the petro-industry?