Oil patch CEO has some kind words for Alberta NDP royalties review panel

The Alberta NDP government appears to realize it is better to listen to the oil patch than to get in a shouting match with a key industry in Alberta that has fallen on hard times.

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Some in the oil patch are responding in kind, rather than being critical of the NDP and claiming its Royalty Review Panel is causing fear within the oil patch, as they have no idea what horrible policies the "socialists" are hatching to hurt investment and profits in the oil industry. This latter view appears to be the line that both the official opposition Wild Rose Party and the Conservatives are taking. The reaction of some in the oil patch is surprisingly different.

The Royalty Review Panel was a key NDP election promise but the thought of such a review with possible increases in oil royalties, at a time of declining prices, revenue, and investment in the oil patch, naturally created jitters in the industry. However, to chair the review Energy Minister McCuaig-Boyd chose banker, Dave Mowat, CEO of provincially-owned ATB Financial back in June. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producer's actually applauded the appointment of Mowat. McCuaig-Boyd said of the review:“I think there was a concern from Albertans, ‘Are we getting our fair share? Could it be different? Could it be better?’ So we are delivering on that promise and reviewing. I think there should be a review every few years on something like that.”

In late August McCuaig-Boyd responded to the loud complaints of the opposition and others about the review creating uncertainty, by announcing that royalty rates would not change before 2017 at the earliest:"Our government is committing that the current royalty framework will remain in place until the end of 2016. That is to say, for 16 months companies and investors can operate with certainty, knowing there will be no changes in the royalty framework."

The review panel is to report to the government by the end of 2015. There is even a website for citizen input into the review. With the review process now well under way, Brian Schmidt, president and CEO of Tamarack Valley Energy and a member of the board of governors of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers(CAPP) said: “I’ve been through two royalty reviews already, back under the Stelmach days. I will tell you this is the most efficient process that I’ve seen, with the best people on the committee that I’ve seen. I’m probably seeing a little more openness to listen than I’ve seen in the past from the government side,”While CAPP will probably see many of its 60 recommendations rejected, the oil patch appears to believe they will achieve more by cooperating with the NDP rather than simply subjecting the committee to a barrage of partisan attacks. Mowat has himself said the industry had been quite cooperative in providing the panel information it requested. The NDP for its part is not about to challenge the capitalist nature of Alberta's oil industry, even by such mild socialist measures as taking provincial ownership of some Alberta oil companies that will be available at cheap prices because of low oil prices. That will be left to those energy companies still able to fund such purchases, often large global players or even state-owned enterprises. If the NDP wants to be elected again, it will need not only to make peace with the oil patch but develop policies that will help it through these hard times.

Schmidt credited the review panel with having a useful discussion of ways to add efficiencies to the system, for example by rethinking the way royalties were applied to wells so as to encourage companies to recover oil more productively.Schmidt said:“I think there is a huge opportunity, a huge win for Albertans and the industry if we look at things . . . to improve recovery. Make the pie bigger instead of [taking] a bigger slice of a smaller pie.”

Conservatives decide to euthanize HarperPAC shortly after giving birth to it

There are many ways in which political parties and governments can promote their agendas through the media and other activities. PACs or Political Action Committees are a common vehicle for doing this in the US.

 

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In the US, PAC's are a legally-defined type of organization meant to promote various causes. Often they are simply used to promote large companies such as Pepsi or groups of professionals such as the American Banker's Association. When the organizations have a political link they often use their names to hide this link as in Republican's Mitt Romney's Super PAC Restore Our Future. In Canada, these types of organizations would be called "third parties". Before election campaigns, they and the political parties are able to advertise and spend free of the restrictions on spending that apply during the period of a formal campaign. We are already seeing American style attack ads on our TV screens.

HarperPAC was apparently designed to counter union-backed ads. However, it did sponsor a radio ad targeting the Liberal leader Justin Trudeau. After less than a week, its website shut down last Thursday. HarperPAC was started by a group that included a number of former Conservative staff members. The name and those running the third party group clearly brand it as on behalf of the Conservative government and party even using the last name of Prime Minister Stephen Harper in its name. Perhaps Harper and the government may have decided that is a very bad idea given that Harper's ratings are not that high.

The union-backed group that HarperPAC was meant to combat calls itself "Engage Canada". That group was started by former NDP and Liberal strategists. It is more anti-Harper policies rather than a direct promoter of either the Liberals, NDP, or unions. Its name sounds positively non-partisan compared to HarperPAC. Spokesperson for the Conservative Party, Kory Teneycke,pointed out a serious problem for the party in that the HarperPAC was using the name of the prime minister and raised money and ran advertising without input or control or even association with the Conservative election campaign. He said that Conservative supporters should show their support by donations at the party website: "What we were concerned with in this particular case is to a reasonable person, it appeared to be us. It appeared to be the Conservative Party, it appeared to be the prime minister,This other approach is sort of misleading and that's why we wanted to put an end to the use of, really, our name and our brand."He said there was no communication between the party and the group. This sounds very strange that people so close to the party would set up something like this and not communicate with the party and use Harper's name without discussing this with him and party officials. There are already anti-union groups working to counter groups such as "Engage Canada". The group "Working Canadians" is said to aim at countering excessive union influence over government, the economy, and society.

There are many ways in which various lobby groups can influence party policies. Stephen Harper himself was at one time president of the National Citizen's Coalition(NCC) The NCC early on campaigned against "socialized medicine" and the Canada Health Act. It now supports privatization, tax cuts, and government spending cuts. It opposes electoral laws that limit third party spending and wants "more freedom through less government". The NCC holds no annual membership meetings and does not provide financial statements to members. The group has headquarters in Toronto and an estimated annual budget of $2.8 million. dollars. There are also many "think tanks" that support either right-leaning or left-leaning policies. On the right there is the well known Fraser Institute and on the left Canadian Policy Alternatives. Many corporate bodies also push for policies that may help one party rather than others. For example the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers has a great many ads promoting the type of energy development supported by the Harper government. A sample is appended but they are ubiquitous on TV. A very significant source of promotion for policies of the ruling party are government sponsored information ads which often combine limited information often one-sided with promotion of government policy or feel good shots as in the one appended starring cute and cuddly Stephen Harper and pandas.

The former Canadian chief electoral officer worries that influence from big money using political action campaigns will undo decades of work that have tried to remove that influence from Canadian politics:Jean-Pierre Kingsley says Canada is headed down the road well trodden in the United States, where political action committees, or PACs, raise and spend staggering amounts of money to influence elections, without the same restrictions that apply to political parties.

The introduction of fixed dates for elections has resulted in many third party groups spending huge amounts on advertising without any restrictions before the actual election campaign period. Kingsley also said that the development was inspired by the American example. Kingsley complains: "We are in, effectively, a free-for-all zone. It took us 40 years of scandal, sweat to come to a regime where we had the best in the world for control of money in politics ... now we are back in the jungle."While the NDP and Liberals are promoting their own anti-Harper campaign through the Engage Canada group and are also spending huge sums on ads themselves before the election campaign starts, the NDP at least has used the short-lived HarperPAC as a fund-raising device:"This week, we learned that Stephen Harper's friends have set up a U.S.-style group called the HarperPAC to spend an obscene amount of money on Harper's re-election. It's the kind of money we've never seen before in Canadian politics, and it's up to us to fight back right now."

I expect that HarperPAC like the Phoenix will rise from its ashes but with a thorough rebranding.

Harper Conservative government has close connections with oil industry lobbyists

Natural Resources Minister in the Canadian federal government, Greg Rickford was recruited by an oil industry lobby group to both give a pep talk and strategic planning advice to 40 to 50 oil industry executives.

 

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The secret, closed door meeting was held last October at the luxurious Banff Springs Hotel in the Rocky Mountains. The meeting was the annual strategy session of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producters (Capp). Rickford's speech was never made public but a copy was obtained by the Greenpeace campaign under the Freedom of Information Act and made available to the Guardian newspaper.The speech makes no mention of climate change or studies that show the effects of development of the tar sands on global warming. Rickford describes the debate on the side of those scientists and other campaigners against development of the tar sands as being governed by myth and emotion that "crowded out the real facts." The Harper government has been accused of itself trying to hide the real facts about issues by silencing scientists who do not agree with the official facts.

Last year, the Alberta tar sands producers launched a new public relations campaign replete with ads showing how oil sands development produced jobs not just in Alberta but elsewhere in Canada. The oil producers are attempting to counter concerns about tar sands development causing climate change, worries about pipeline breaks, and accidents involving oil tanker cars. Keith Stewart, of Greenpeace Canada said: “This is a government minister giving political and communications advice to the industry he is supposed to be regulating." However a spokesperson for Rickford, Christopher McClusky said that the minister regularly attended events in order to help promote Canada's energy industry. That is fair enough, but it does not explain the fact that this meeting was secret and that his speech was not made public. Nor does it address the issue of his actually giving advice to the industry.

The close relationship between the Harper government and the oil industry is hardly new nor is the government view that aboriginal activists and environmentalists are adversaries. They are listed as such in a government plan "Pan-European Oil Sands Advocacy Strategy" dated March 2011 and obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Allies are the National Energy Board, Environment Canada, business and industry associations.

Back in 2009 senior representatives from Natural Resources Canada and the Alberta government met with Capp in Washington and agreed to set up a steering committee to develop a joint messaging strategy. Cassie Doyle the Deputy Minister of Natural Resources Canada told the meeting that "we need to meet an active organized anti-oil sands campaign with equal sophistication."

This sophistication includes the funding of fake grass-roots organizations or astroturf NGOs. Energy Citizen, allegedly a grass-roots organization, was launched in 2009 with the support of the American Petroleum Institute. It was quite helpful in defeating climate legislation in the US. Last July, Keith Stewart wrote in aGreenpeace blog:My personal bullshit detector went off when the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers’ (CAPP) launched its own version of “Energy Citizens” (www.energycitizens.ca) six weeks ago. They advertise it as a “movement of Canadians who support Canada’s energy”, but anyone who’s been following climate politics knows that Energy Citizens (www.energycitizens.org) was actually launched by the American Petroleum Institute (API) back in 2009.Capp even imported Derek Spooner, senior director of external mobilization of the American Petroleum Institute to talk to the Canadian version of Energy Citizen about the API's successful grass-roots mobilization efforts in the US.

While opponents call groups such as Energy Citizen "fake" grass-roots organizations , they are real grass-roots in the sense they are not paid lobbyists but ordinary people who have been convinced that environmentalists and aboriginal activists are wrong and should be stopped. The ubiquitous ads promoting energy development as good for Canada and Canadians and their own government's equally strong support for energy development no doubt aid in promoting such views. To call them "fake" is probably counter-productive since it ignores the fact that the people involved believe in what they are doing. A better tactic would be to show that they are being used by the oil industry along with a persuasive presentation of the reasons for not developing the tar sands.