Narwhal Week, Episode 2: How corporate lobbying is delaying climate action in Canada

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Fatima Syed You know that scene in the political thriller where the big CEO of a major company sits in the President’s office and says, you’ll give this much money or this policy, or face the consequences? That’s what I want to talk about today. The technical term for that moment is lobbying. Lobbying is the big underbelly to Canadian politics, and it has quietly and very significantly shaped climate policy as we know it. Now, in reality, lobbying is actually very, very boring. Canada’s oil and gas companies, for example, lobby by just continuously meeting with government officials. According to a report by Environmental Defense, between 2011 and 2018, these companies met with Canadian government officials 110 times. That’s almost four meetings a day. And if you pay close enough attention and read through all the arcane websites and spreadsheets, there’s a direct link between these meetings and the policies the Canadian government creates or doesn’t create for the oil and gas sector, which, for those of you who aren’t following it very closely, remain the highest source of emissions in this country. The language these companies use makes it into government talking points. Their wish lists and demands make it into government policy documents. And sometimes more often than we think, actually, the members representing these oil and gas companies are former government officials themselves. Today we’re going to try and make sense of all this. Welcome back to Narwhal week. I’m Fatima Syed, sitting in for Jordan Heath-Rawlings. And this is the big story. To help us understand how lobbying has shaped Canada’s climate policy today, I’m joined by my friend Carl Meyer. He’s the Narwhal’s climate investigations reporter and he’s joining me from Ottawa. Hi, Carl.

Carl Meyer Hi, Fatima. Thanks for having me.

Fatima Syed I’m really excited to dig into a topic that you and I talk about at dinner parties, but not everyone else does. But before we get into the nitty gritty details, I want to start with Brock Harrison. Tell us who he is and what’s his new job?

Carl Meyer Yeah, Brock Harrison has been a longtime conservative staffer. He most recently worked for Jason Kenney, the former Alberta premier. Before that, he worked for Kennedy’s United Conservative Party Caucus. He’s also worked for Andrew Scheer, who led the federal conservatives. He’s worked for the Wild Rose party, led by Daniel Smith, who’s now the new premier of Alberta. And Harrison’s new job is manager of government relations for the prairies for TC Energy. So TC Energy is one of Canada’s biggest fossil fuel companies. They own tens of thousands of kilometers of pipelines that carry natural gas and crude oil. They are the company behind the coastal GasLink pipeline. That’s crossing was soaked in territory. They are the company behind Keystone XL. And critically, they have a huge presence in the prairies and huge ongoing interests there. They produce power in Alberta. Their pipelines crisscross the prairies. They talked about bringing nuclear power to the oil sands. So all very active files with the provincial government that Harrison is now going to be in charge of getting support from.

Fatima Syed Okay, but why does this matter?

Carl Meyer I mean, he’s not technically in government, so he can do whatever he wants, theoretically. Right. So what’s the significance here? Yeah, I think it matters because his jump directly from the Premier’s office straight into the arms of this big oil and gas company is an example of how the industry has been able to sort of fine tune its ability to create these very close relationships with politicians and government officials. Relationships that they can then exploit to achieve their objectives, like making more money. So just to give you an example, I mentioned Keystone XL. Harrison was in Kenny’s office as TC Energy was lobbying the same office for government assistance on the Keystone XL pipeline. And the relationship between the company and the Premier became so close that at one point they had this joint press conference, kenny and the boss of the company, to talk about launching this big partnership, they called it. And this partnership ended up committing seven and a half billion dollars in financing to subsidize the pipeline expansion. And this was at the time when its completion was absolutely not a foreground conclusion. And the project did end up getting canceled. And after it did, the province was left on the hook for over a billion dollars. So now Harrison is going to work for the same company.

Fatima Syed But Carl, is this legal? Like, is he allowed to do this? Are there any regulations stopping him from doing this?

Carl Meyer I mean, in Alberta there is a conflict of interest law that has a number of different rules for former members of a Premier staff. So things like limits on lobbying public office holders or acting on a commercial basis, they call it, on matters in which they were previously directly acted. But nothing that I’ve seen about Harrison’s accepting this new job suggests he has violated any of those rules. And I think that’s important to be clear on. I talked with the office of the Ethics Commissioner of Alberta and they told me even if TC Energy was asking Harrison to violate some part of the law, and there’s nothing to suggest it is, then just having the job is not enough. You would actually have to do those things to be in violation. And also sometimes what a company does is just tweak the job description so that it follows the law. So the Ethics Commissioner, they wouldn’t tell me if that’s what happened here, but that does go on. Carl, how rare is this or how frequent is this for a former government employee to cross the line into private industry that they used to create policies for? I think it’s pretty common in the oil and gas industry. So there are some well known examples. So former Quebec Premier John Cherry is an example. He just ran for the Federal Conservatives and their leadership race. He became a consultant for TC Energy. Another example is Brad Wall. He was Saskatchewan’s. Former Premier. He became a director at White Cap Resources, which is an oil and gas company. But this is not just Conservatives. You know, in British Columbia recently, there was a whole controversy about this after one of the contenders in the BC NDP leadership race there was disqualified. And that provoked the leader of the BC Greens to write this blistering Twitter thread accusing the NDP of becoming too close with fossil fuel lobbyists. So, for example, the NDP’s former provincial director Michael Gardner, he has lobbied on behalf of Tourmaline Oil, natural gas producer and Pamela Pipeline, which runs on gas pipelines. There’s also Stephen Howard, a former chief of staff in the party who has lobbied for Tourmaline. And you can go into the BC lobbyist registry and see all these kind of records for yourself. That’s officially too many examples.

Fatima Syed Can we back up for a second? What does the lobbyists actually do? What is their day to day look like?

Carl Meyer So a lobbyist is someone who works on behalf of a company or an organization to influence government in a way that benefits what they’re working for. So with corporations, this is usually about trying to increase their profits. And as you said, the basic way, the way most of us think about it is to lobby government officials to do things like change a bill that the government’s writing, or a regulation that they’re developing, or a new program, or a subsidy, or a government contract that’s being considered. And the lobbyists connects with government officials and recommends these changes to them. And that kind of stuff happens all the time, and you can go check it out yourself and the provincial or federal lobbying registries. But yeah, the point I think I want to make is that lobbying is much more subtle than this. It’s about trying to change the thinking of government officials so that they start to think in ways that are friendlier to corporate interests. And they do this by ingratiating themselves. So meeting with government officials over and over, or communicating with them over and over, building these close relationships. And during this time, they are feeding them this statistic or that report or this piece of material from the industry and basically throwing up this big snowstorm of information that’s all designed to appear to be informative to the government official, but actually amounts to this corporate perspective on an issue. And over time, the lobbyists become familiar to the government official. They’re a familiar face. The government becomes familiar with their viewpoints and their judgments about things. So familiar that the lobbyist perspective about an issue starts to pop into the government officials heads when they think of a certain topic or they’re working when it comes time to make a decision. And this corporate way of thinking starts to crowd out other competing perspectives.

Fatima Syed Carl, you’ve been investigating the extent and results of lobbying efforts for so many years now. How has it actually impacted climate policy in Canada?

Carl Meyer Yeah, a very specific example of a lobbying win is a story that I wrote in June based on some leaked documents that showed how this big oil and gas company called Canadian Natural Resources Limited, or CNRL, had persuaded the government, Alberta, to water down the rules on methane pollution. So methane is a greenhouse gas. It’s a climate pollutant. The industry vents it into the sky. It also leaks from their equipment. So tackling methane is one of the most straightforward ways of cracking down on emissions because you fix the leaks, you stop the venting. And the regulator, the energy regulator in the province, had drawn up these plans to crack down on methane. And CNRL was able to persuade the Minister, over the objections of the regulator, the repeated objections to instead back this weaker plan that they had come up with, that the company had drawn up. So our documents showed that the company had created this presentation that contained this proposal and this whole pitch for their weaker plan. And suddenly this presentation lands in the hands of the Minister’s chief of staff, Marcella Monroe. Monroe is a former natural gas lobbyist and now works for Tech Resources, by the way, which is a huge mining company. And Monroe is asking the regulator how it plans to deal with the industry’s concerns about all this. And soon after, we can see, there is a phone call with the Minister where the company’s concerns are relayed directly from the Minister’s office to the regulator. And shortly after that, the Minister kind of puts the brakes on the rules being developed and published for public review. And when they finally do come out, they’ve got the company’s proposal in them. This is actually insane when you just lay it all out like this. So simply yeah. I think another example would be the lobbying that happened against the federal government’s clean fuel standard. So this is a program that’s supposed to lower the carbon intensity of gasoline and diesel. And it’s been a long time coming. It was promised way back in 2016. And there is a strategy document, Greenpeace published it actually, that was designed for the industry by this PR firm. And it describes this plan to undermine public support for the clean fuel standard, in part by convincing people that fighting climate change, as they say, is a losing battle. So it’s not worth trying to clean up the gas or the diesel because we’re all screwed anyway. And so it happens that the government delayed the clean Fuel standard implementation. And another example I would say is the industry has been able to convince a lot of people that they require all these subsidies, even though right now companies are making record profits. This is basically one of the best years ever for the oil patch. We’re talking hundreds of billions of dollars being pulled in by the industry. Companies like Imperial Oil are posting, like, literally billions of dollars in profits. And at the same time, the industry is convincing governments to give them these huge tax breaks. So the federal government created this tax credit for carbon capture technology, two $6 billion over five years, a billion and a half per year after that. And yet the companies are still not satisfied. They want an even bigger tax credit.

Fatima Syed But Carl, it’s not just the oil and gas sector, right? Like, earlier this year, you found out that lobbying efforts had delayed climate action in the financial sector, for example.

Carl Meyer Yes. I think it’s important to remember that Canadian banks are backing a lot of the oil and gas industry, financing their operations or providing other kind of services. And you can see how that support has translated into a push from the banking sector to delay climate financial transparency reforms. So I did another story on a letter from the Canadian Bankers Association. So they represent the big Five, right? TD, Scotia Bank RBC, CIBC, BMO. And they were pushing back against financial regulators who are proposing these new rules that would require companies to report information about how climate change is going to disrupt their businesses under different scenarios. And this is the kind of information that all over the world, investors need to make different choices about buying and selling stocks and moving money around the system to start flowing to companies that are less at risk from economic disruptions triggered by climate change, and by doing so, making the whole financial system more transparent. And not only are the banks lobbying against that, they are also doing that as they are promoting publicly how they recognize the urgency of climate change and how they understand the financial sector is key to the low carbon transition. And you can see the disconnect there with one of the banks, RBC, which is now under investigation by the Competition Bureau for whether their marketing practices are making false or misleading representations on the environment.

Fatima Syed Carl, is there any obligation for politicians to report contact with industry lobbyists? Do they have to, like, you know, document every single meeting they have, and they seem to have a lot of them?

Carl Meyer Yeah, it depends. So under federal law, it depends on who starts the meeting. So usually lobbyists are initiating meetings with public office holders. That’s the term. And in those cases, they all have to report it. If a federal official initiates a meeting and it falls into certain categories, like it’s about legislation or regulations, then they don’t actually have to report it under the law.

Fatima Syed Like, let me ask a different question. Is there anyone proposing or doing anything to help lessen the influence of these large companies? Are lobbying firms in government?

Carl Meyer Yeah, I think there’s a few groups out there. The Corporate mapping project is an example they’re trying to shine a light on the connections between industry and government. You know, I think sunlight is important. I think lobbying works best. All of this stuff works best when no one is paying attention. And so, you know, that’s where the Narwhal comes in. If you permit me to make a plug. We are reporting on the influence of some of the most powerful corporations in the country. We are showing how close these industries are to government officials, how powerful these special interest groups are at manipulating public opinion. And we need help. This stuff is expensive. It takes time. And we’re a nonprofit news organization, so we need leadership, we need subscribers, and we need help in the form of information so you can get in touch with me, you can send anything. If you’re a government official, I always love to talk to you. It can be anonymous. We have a page on our website where you can figure out how to submit information anonymously, and we can help get this information out there. We can help provide a counterweight to these large lobbying firms.

Fatima Syed This is just such an insane web that you’ve laid out for us, Carl. Thank you so much for putting Sunlight to use, your words on lobbying efforts across the country and how they are impacting climate policy.

Carl Meyer No problem. Thanks for that. I mean, this is really fun.

Fatima Syed That was Karl Meyer, the Narwhals climate investigations reporter. And that was another episode of Narwhal week on The Big Story. We love digging deep into all things climate, so we hope you’re enjoying these conversations. You can always learn more by reading Carl stories on the Narwhal CA. We’ve linked some of them in the show notes. And just a reminder, the Narwhal is Canada’s first English language registered journalism organization. That means we’re a nonprofit, and all our members and donors receive tax receipts. If you want to support award winning climate journalism, check us out. Maybe subscribe to join our pod. That’s what we call our little collective of members. You could get cool flag like a toque or a tote. And if you want more climate journalism on this show, tell them and then tell them again. The Big Story loves suggestions and really wants to know how to COVID the biggest emergency of our times. You can find the show on Twitter at thebixtory FPN. You can email the show hello at thebigstory CA. You can even go old school and pick up the phone and call them and leave a voicemail. 416-935-5935. This podcast is in all the podcast apps from Apple to Spotify to whatever else exists on there. So find us and talk about us and subscribe or hit the like button or whatever. Thanks so much for listening. I’m fat. Mosed sitting in for Jordan. He’s rawlings. We’ll see you soon tomorrow for another episode with me and one of my friends at The Narwhal.