A Whistleblower’s Open Letter to the Citizens of Canada

My name is Andrew Frank. I grew up in a small town in the Okanagan valley of British Columbia. My granddad taught me how to fish. My father was a well‐respected lawyer known for his unwavering integrity, and my mother was a favourite kindergarten teacher.Both have always impressed upon me the importance of telling the truth.

Today, I am taking the extraordinary step of risking my career, my reputation and my personal friendships, to act as a whistle blower and expose the undemocratic and potentially illegal pressure the Harper government has apparently applied to silence critics of the Enbridge Northern Gateway oil tanker/pipeline plan.As I have detailed in a sworn affidavit, no less than three senior managers with Tides Canada and Forest Ethics (a charitable project of Tides Canada), have informed me, as the Senior Communications Manager for Forest Ethics, that Tides Canada CEO, Ross McMillan,was informed by the Prime Minister’s Office, that Forest Ethics is considered an “Enemy of the Government of Canada,” and an “Enemy of the people of Canada.”This language was apparently part of a threat by the Prime Minister’s Office to challenge the charitable status of Tides Canada if it did not agree to stop funding Forest Ethics, specifically its work opposing oilsands expansion and construction of oil sands tanker/pipeline routes in Canada.

This is especially concerning because Forest Ethics is a legally registered intervenor in the National Energy Board’s Joint Review Panel process, currently examining the Enbridge oil tanker/pipeline proposal. By attempting to silence a registered participant in the review, I fear the Harper government may have permanently damaged the integrity of this process. Read the complete Post.

By Terry Glavin, The Ottawa CitizenJanuary 12, 2012

China is gaining control of Canada’s natural resources. Carbon bomb for the planet. Energy insecurity for Canada. Vandy

If there were a global competition for the most brazen and preposterously transparent attempt by a ruling political party to change a necessary subject of national debate with alarmist distractions and hubbub, the Conservative escapade engineered in Ottawa these past few days really deserves some kind of grand prize.

First it was Prime Minister Stephen Harper himself, carrying on about some sort of conspiracy involving jet-setting American radical billionaire eco-saboteurs who are intent upon blocking Canada’s vital bitumen semi-fluids by ambuscading the Enbridge pipeline hearings that began this week in the Haisla village of Kitimat on British Columbia’s north coast.

Then Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver got in on the act. “These groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda. … They use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest.” A problem: when he went dredging around for evidence, Oliver came up with a two-month delay in approving some skating pond in Banff National Park. Then he tried backtracking. He’d suddenly found himself keeping company with conspiracy theorists who like making dirty insinuations about Ducks Unlimited. You had to feel sorry for the guy.

But if we’re seriously supposed to be going all villagers-with-torches about foreign outfits with weird ideologies undermining Canada’s national economic interests, let’s review what’s really going on, shall we?

The $5.5-billion Enbridge pipeline project is all about sending Alberta bitumen in huge oil tankers to China. Beijing’s own state enterprises are among the project’s major backers, and Beijing has been buying up Alberta’s oilpatch at such a dizzying pace lately it’s hard to keep up. In the spring of 2010, China’s state-owned Sinopec Corp. took a $4.65-billion piece of Syncrude. Then the China Investment Corporation, which is run by the Chinese Communist Party, took possession of a $1.25-billon share of Penn West Petroleum. Last summer, the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation gobbled up Opti Canada for $2.34 billion. And so on. Read the complete Post.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012 1:27 AM
Mish Shedlock

Great summary of Peak Oil and Overpopulation in relation to each other. Vandy

“In the last 200 years the population of our planet has grown exponentially, at a rate of 1.9% per year. If it continued at this rate, with the population doubling every 40 years, by 2600 we would all be standing literally shoulder to shoulder.” says Professor Stephen Hawking as reported by Edward Morgan in Looking at the New Demography.

Suffice to say the rate of population growth will not continue, and Morgan makes the case we are already in stage 5 of The Demographic Transition Model

Peak Oil Implications on Population Growth Read the complete Post.

By Rex Weyler
Jan. 9, 2012

But the B.S. is worse than this: The ISEEE report from U. of Calgary says that the price differential is only the difference in transportation costs between Alberta and the US Gulf Coast and Alberta and China, which is between $2 and $3 (not $8!) and even less for dilbit crude (diluted bitumen) for export by Enbridge. However, even if we accept the high $3 savings .. a generous interpretation .. Read the complete Post.

Jan. 5, 2012

At last some common ground between those for and against the tar sands pipelines from Alberta to BC! In “Proposed pipeline generates flood of support, opposition”, Kathryn Marshall of of EthicalOil (an oxymoron right up there with HealthyCancer) is quoted as saying: “Foreigner billionaires and their local lobbyists should butt out” of the pipeline decision.

I agree! And the first foreigner billionaires I’d like to butt out are Rich Kinder and Bill Morgan, the American ex-Enron billionaires who bought BC’s Terasen pipeline back in 2005 and want to ramp it up to 700,000 barrels of tar sands crude oil per day, shipped out on tankers right past Stanley Park. Maybe Kinder and Morgan could sell the pipeline back to Canadians, so we can make our own decisions about how many oil spills we want to risk to enrich the Chinese and American oil companies investing in the tar sands. Oh wait – maybe they could butt out too!

Jon Cooksey

http://howtoboilafrog.com

Thursday, Dec 15, 2011 11:05 AM PST
Emails show how a Washington lobbyist enlisted Canadian officials to beat back U.S. carbon standards

When President Barack Obama decided in early November to delay a decision on TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline until after the next election, America’s environmental movement celebrated one of its biggest victories in recent memory. And no doubt the news came as a blow to Alberta’s tar sands industry, and to Canada’s oft-stated dream of becoming the next global energy superpower.

But behind activists’ jubilation lurked a somber reality, an untold story with much wider implications. The broader fight to reform Alberta’s tar sands, the one which actually stood a chance of breaking America’s addiction to the continent’s most polluting road fuel, has been quietly abandoned over the past several years. For that we can thank the planet’s richest oil companies and their Canadian government allies, who’ve together waged a stealthy war against President Obama’s climate change ambitions. Read the complete Post.