The Narwhal's reporting on TC Energy's political manipulations is the most important Canadian political story of the year
If we want to keep Canada as a functioning democracy, we need to maintain the separation of oil and state. That's under threat as never before.
The Narwhal, a Canadian Magazine, is currently breaking one of the most important pieces of investigative journalism I’ve read.
I’ll share the links below - because as the story unfolds, it’s shows a clear picture of the ways in which companies - in this case oil companies - are working with Canadian provincial governments to write their own rules to undermine climate change and energy regulation in Canada, with a benefit of billions of dollars in greater profit for TC.
The revelations are stunning. It began with this article, where a recording of a former BC NDP Staffer who worked in the office of Premier John Horgan, at a TC meeting.
With a cheerful preamble, Liam Iliffe, a B.C.-based political staffer turned industry executive, introduces himself to his colleagues at TC Energy, a major North American energy company that builds and operates crude oil and natural gas pipelines and other energy infrastructure. He summarizes his background working for the BC New Democrats as a senior advisor under former premier John Horgan. He talks about how his work there included ensuring cross-party support for legislative changes needed to push through the Coastal GasLink pipeline and LNG Canada. The call is a “lunch and learn” session for the company’s external relations employees across North America.
During his presentation, Iliffe repeatedly emphasized the importance of developing and maintaining relationships with politicians and public servants. He claimed the company regularly engages in lobbying — activities meant to influence public policy, a common practice governed by both federal and provincial laws — outside of business hours.
“We’ve been given opportunities to write entire briefing notes for ministers and premiers and prime ministers,” a TC Energy executive was recorded saying in a leaked tape from March 2024, adding that sometimes “overworked and underpaid” public servants “just want the job done for them.” …
He says TC Energy played a pivotal role in excluding pipelines from key climate regulations in British Columbia, saving the company billions in revenue. He claims TC Energy leverages relationships with Canadian ambassadors, Indigenous leaders and senior government officials to sway government decisions. He suggests the company conducts impromptu lobbying of elected officials by placing its staffers in positions where they can “bump into” prominent decision makers in informal settings.
Notably, he claims these tactics were successful in persuading B.C. Premier David Eby to change his mind about taking action to address the climate crisis.
After the recordings were released, Iliffe quit, and TC and others have denied the story. The B.C. Attorney General is investigating.
That won’t be enough. Given the seriousness of the allegations, asking people at a parliamentary committee would be a start, but an inquiry would be even better.
While there have been various denials, especially from the Federal Government, there is a lot of very important political and historical context to fill in,
First of all, in Canada, natural resources, pipelines and the environment are all primarily the jurisidiction of provincial governments. As people say, Canada is one of the “most decentralized” countries in the world, which means that provinces and terrories have jurisdiction over way more of the laws and regulations than the federal government is. The federal government generally only gets involved when it involves crossing a border, either provincial or national. So if a pipeline, a mine or an oil well are all in the same province, the federal government doesn’t sign off on it.
This is incredibly important in the context of a powderkeg that was set off with protests around the liquid natural gas (LNG) pipeline that was going to run through Wetʼsuwetʼen.
Neither Canada nor BC actually have a treaty with Wetʼsuwetʼen. There are parts of Canada were there are treaties with First Nations, which in real legal terms means that the Canadian government and BC have a problem.
The company behing the pipeline, LNG Canada, is a joint venture between Shell, PETRONAS, PetroChina, Mitsubishi Corporation and KOGAS.
Now, Shell is a private British company; PETRONAS is the Malaysian Government’s oil company; PetroChina is a branch of the Chinese Government owned China National Petroleum Corporation; Mitsubish Corporation is the largest corporation in Japan, and KOGAS is owned by the Korean Government.
In 2022, the budget for the project was an estimated $40-billion. The promise of the project is that Canada’s “clean” natural gas will be used to generate electricity instead of burning coal. While it’s been argued that coal is the worst because of particulate and soot pollution, when you burn coal, it converts from carbon in solid form, to carbon dioxide. Natural gas burns more cleanly and efficiently. There’s no soot, and you get about twice the energy for the same carbon dioxide emissions.
Think of it like having better kinds of insulation in your walls. When you live where I do, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, where the climate can be positively Siberian, having good insulation is something you can understand and appreciate.
So, let’s say you’re insulating your walls in a new house. There’s a carbon-dioxide based insulation, but your walls have to be 28 inches (71 cm) thick. But you can get the same level of insulation with just one inch of natural gas, because it holds the heat in so much better. That means natural gas leaks during production will cancel out any climate benefits.
Now, it should be said that there are other benefits to replacing coal, including human public health as well as for wildlife and the broader environment. The Himalayas are an important source of water for China and India, and soot on the snow is accelerating melting - but more methane could do the same.
With major international players as co-partners in this project, it’s important to remember that the whole project and pipeline falls within the borders of British Columbia. This matters because since it did not cross provincial borders, almost all of the project approval and sign off was by the provincial government of British Columbia.
That was strangely forgotten when it came to Wet’Suwet’En. When folks with a competing claim to authority for the Wet’Suwet’En had set up a blockade to prevent workers from getting through, the company sought an injunction to have them removed, the RCMP went in, and it created a global firestorm of protest.
Here too, there is an important question of jurisdiction. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) are not like the FBI. In Canada, the federal government has sole jurisiction over the criminal law. There are provincial offenses, but they tend to be minor. Canada has one criminal law for the whole country that police officers all enforce, whether they work for a federal, provincial, territorial or municipal police force.
There is another difference between the RCMP and the FBI, which is that RCMP works providing policing services in rural municipalities across Western Canada.
So while there were cross-country protests aimed at the Federal Government, and a “federal” police force, all of the actions were at the provincial level.
Across Canada and globally, the Federal Government of Justin Trudeau was blamed for actions that were entirely due to the province of British Columbia.
If this occurred in the U.S. it’s as if the actions of Texas or Alabama were blamed on the Federal Government.
All of this matters, especially because when we talk about natural resources in Canada, it is almost entirely provincial. That puts Iliffe’s comment about TC Energy writing “entire briefing notes for ministers and premiers and prime ministers” the briefing note is much more likely to be generated at the provincial level, and the provinces would then present or use those briefing notes in when applying for federal approval. The federal government would make the decision based on the application prepared for them by each province.
It is extremely difficult to believe the attempts to deny or dismiss Iliffe’s recorded statements as exaggeration. As the Narwhal journalists noted, no one else on the call called him out on any of it. The other is that Iliffe was himself, just two years before, working for the Premier of British Columbia as a senior advisor - a position he had held for years. However you might characterize Iliffe, politically inexperienced, he ain’t.
This matters from the point of view that people have of the environmental policies of Canada’s supposed party of “the left”, the NDP. The “Leap Manifesto,” crafted by Martin Lukacs and Naomi Klein was a milestone in political greenwashing from when NDP governments and the entitites who support them have, for 30 years, vigorously opposed environmental regulations and done everything they can to block any action on climate change.
In the 1990s, the Saskatchewan NDP government of Roy Romanow passed unanimous motions opposing the Kyoto Accord (the then-global climate agreement), while the NDP BC Government and unions were often in conflict with First Nations’ rights as well as environmentalists.
In the 2000s, the NDP opposed the carbon tax at the provincial and federal level. It was opposed by the NDP in British Columbia and in Manitoba, as well as at the federal level by Jack Layton.
The province of Manitoba was praised by the libertarian junk economics machine, The Fraser Institute, for being the “freest” jurisdiction when it came to natural resources. What this means in practice is that Manitoba, which has some of the worst poverty in Canada, had bigger tax breaks, lower royalties, and weaker environmental controls for oil and gas companies.
The fact that Manitoba NDP Premier Gary Doer was appointed to be Canada’s highest representative to the U.S. was telling. Doer’s job was to try to get pipelines built from Canada to the U.S. It didn’t happen - but Doer was continually presented in the media as a “green premier” because he was building Hydro dams.
After nearly two decades in power, an investigation by the province of Manitoba’s Auditor General into climate change policies found that emissions had grown and nothing had been done.
Patrick Muttart
The role of Patrick Muttart as the senior vice president of external relations is also significant, for a number of very important reasons. Muttart was one of the architects behind Stephen Harper’s rise to power, and he worked in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), in communications. He left and worked as a consultant.
He was working as a consultant for the Conservative campaign in 2011 when he had to quit after the Quebecois owner of Sun Media, Pierre Karl Peladeau, said that Muttart was trying to undermine the credibility of his entire media chain by handing one of Sun Media’s executives a doctored picture of then-Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff.
As Toronto Life Reported:
From Péladeau’s account in the Toronto Sun:
Three weeks ago, our vice-president for Sun News, Kory Teneycke, was contacted by the former deputy chief of staff to Prime Minister Harper, Patrick Muttart. He claimed to be in possession of a report prepared by a “U.S. source” … [which] suggested that rather than being an observer from the sidelines, as he wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece… Ignatieff was in fact on the front lines and on the ground at a forward operating base in Kuwait, assisting U.S. State Department and American military officials in their strategy sessions. Muttart also provided a compelling electronic image of a man very closely resembling Michael Ignatieff in American military fatigues, brandishing a rifle in a picture purported to have been taken in Kuwait in December 2002.
Check out the pretty dubious, low-rez picture the Sun management was snookered into believing was Ignatieff at the source.
Our first reaction to this story? Good on PKP and the Sun papers for being so forthcoming about the process that went into making this pretty serious unforced error. Our second, less charitable, reaction is—seriously? The management of a multi-million-dollar corporation was hoodwinked by a crappy photo and a tale that was debunked within hours of appearing online?
Since the mea culpa went live, the Conservative Party has confirmed to CBC that it did indeed provide the material and has also apparently fired Muttart for the whole fiasco. Strangely, Péladeau seems to think that the Conservatives were trying to discredit QMI and specifically Sun News. But we find that a little hard to swallow—if there was more going on than the simple belief that the Sun would publish what it was fed, we’ll eat tomorrow’s page 3.
The same Patrick Muttart who was fired for trying to plant blatant lies in the media about a political opponent in the middle of a national election is the Senior Vice President of External Relations for TC Energy.
How close was Muttart to the Conservatives and Stephen Harper? When he left the PMO in 2009, CTV news reported that it left a “huge hole”:
“He was considered so critical to Stephen Harper's success that mere chatter about a possible election once forced him to cut short his honeymoon -- leaving his new bride alone in Japan.
Now Patrick Muttart is leaving Canadian politics.
"This leaves a massive hole," said one government official.
"He taught the conservative movement in Canada how to win elections again."
Harper hired him after the crushing election loss of 2004.
Muttart arrived with an encyclopedic knowledge of the successful election strategies of conservatives around the world from Margaret Thatcher to Richard Nixon.”
The Narwhal has added two more to their series on the TC energy leaks.
Here’s the first one -
Inside a former TC Energy exec’s claim he got pro-pipeline messaging ‘stuck on government letterhead’
And here’s the second, which has an absolutely jaw-dropping claim, that they successfully persuaded Canada’s spy agency, CSIS to change its policy so that security information could be shared with private corporations.
Former Trump staffers are ‘on the battlefield’ for a Canadian fossil fuel giant
Recordings reveal TC Energy’s alleged attempts to influence governments in North America through sophisticated intelligence gathering, fostering relationships with national security officials and countering opposition to fossil fuel developments
This links inexorably to the Globe and Mail’s report from 2019 about a meeting between oil executives and conservative politicians plotting a way to defeat the Trudeau Liberals.
On April 11, 2019,
“Top Conservative politicians met with oil-industry executives at a private conference to map out strategy for ousting Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in a sign of growing collaboration between the Alberta-based sector and its political backers ahead of the federal election this fall…
Attendees included Michael Binnion, CEO of Questerre Energy Corp.; Patrick Ward, CEO of Painted Pony Energy Ltd.; Perpetual Energy Inc. CEO Susan Riddell Rose; and her husband, Mike Rose, head of Tourmaline Oil Corp, according to a copy of the confidential agenda that was obtained by The Globe and Mail.
All are board members of the advocacy group, which says it aims to “shift the conversation” on energy so that Canadians embrace “the miracle of modern hydrocarbons," according to its website. They are also governors of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), which represents the sector’s largest companies; only Mr. Binnion responded to a message seeking comment.
The agenda makes clear the event was highly political.
Federal Conservative Party Leader Andrew Scheer delivered a keynote address, the document showed. His national campaign director, Hamish Marshall, and veteran Conservative organizer Mark Spiro spoke on a panel about “rallying the base” by using friendly interest groups that operate independently of the party.
Oil and gas lobby groups plan to participate actively in the coming federal election to push an agenda that includes more pipelines, lower taxes and less regulation. In February, Mr. Scheer spoke at a rally on Parliament Hill after a convoy of protesters arrived from Alberta to condemn Prime Minister Trudeau’s energy and immigration policies…
One session at the conference focused on deploying “litigation as a tool” to silence environmental critics and featured U.S. opposition researcher Mike Roman, who served as special assistant and director of special projects and research under Donald Trump until last year. He spoke alongside Arthur Hamilton, a lawyer with Quebec-based Resolute Forest Products, the agenda showed. Mr. Hamilton is also a lawyer for the federal Conservative Party. Resolute has waged a long-running and largely unsuccessful court battle against Greenpeace.
Another panel was dubbed “Paths to federal election victory" and was led by an executive for polling firm Ipsos Public Affairs who was introduced by CAPP president Tim McMillan.
That’s a lot of names - but a few deserve special focus, because of their further connections.
Hamish Marshall - founder and board member of The Rebel, run by Ezra Levant. Marshall was Andrew Scheer’s campaign manager and is a consultant to other political parties.
Mike Roman. In 2019, Roman was director of special projects for Trump, and this article in The Tyee details more of his background. Roman has been indicted in Georgia for his role in the 2020 election denial of Donald Trump.
Roman’s indictment alleges that in late November 2020, he urged other campaign officials to contact state legislators in Georgia to encourage them to appoint Trump electors — after Trump had clearly lost the election.
Roman also organized speakers for a Dec. 10, 2020 hearing before a Georgia house committee to spread false information, namely that the state’s vote was riddled with fraud. Giuliani, also indicted under the same racketeering statute as Roman, was the star of that s*** show.
But Roman’s role was even bigger. According to testimony before the select congressional committee probing the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Roman handled most of the organizing of the fake electors scheme in seven battleground states…
At the time of Roman’s participation in that closed-door meeting in Alberta, the Republican operative was closely associated with an organization named the International Democrat Union. Roman first shows up as the organization’s treasurer, later as assistant chairman. The chairman of the IDU was then, and is now, Stephen Harper.
And on February 15, 2022, Mike Roman tweeted this from his account. Apparently he was in Ottawa during the Convoy Occupation.
That is quite a track record.
The political reality of Canada is that while the Conservatives are seen as the party of “management” and social conservatism and the NDP supposed to be the party of “workers” and medicare, they are both fundamentally petro-parties, in terms of support, supporters and revenue. Across the Canadian West, in BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, unionized workers work on natural resource projects that generate incredible profits, and the less regulation, oversight and taxes, the greater the profits.
Those profits have been colossal lately - as a direct result of U.S. oil companies colluding with the OPEC Cartel to drive up prices without increasing production.
The other biggest story you’re not hearing about - oil price fixing and inflation
In May of this year, the Federal Trade Commision (FTC) gave a green light to a merger between Exxon and Pioneer Natural Resources, but barred Pioneer CEO from sitting on the board of Exxon due to his alleged role in enforcing price fixing, in collusion with OPEC.
The Federal Trade Commission said Sheffield, then CEO of Pioneer Natural Resources, exchanged hundreds of text messages discussing pricing, production and oil market dynamics with officials at the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, the oil cartel led by Saudi Arabia.
Matt Stoller wrote about oil price-fixing between U.S. producers and OPEC, and estimated that over one quarter of all inflation in the U.S. in 2022 was due to the scheme.
In 2014, Saudi Arabia decided to undercut shale energy producers who were suddenly able to unlock oil and especially natural gas with fracking. By “undercut” we mean “bankrupt,” by dropping the price of oil from over $100 a barrel, where it had been for several years, to well under $50.
In Canada, the results were devastating - unemployment, bankruptcies, billions in lost investment.
But by 2022, the price of energy increased so much that oil company profits tripled - but they did not invest in new production. So Americans and Canadians had to pay thousands of dollars a year in new oil profits per person - causing more than a quarter of the inflation in 2022.
In 2022, total revenue for the Canadian oil and gas extraction industry rose 53.6% to $269.9 billion, following an 87.5% increase in 2021. The 2022 increase was attributable to increased economic activity and increased demand for energy products.
According to the Raw materials price index, the price of crude oil and bitumen in 2022 increased by 49.0% from 2021, while the price of natural gas increased by 25.6%. Total production for crude oil rose by 2.3% in 2022, while total natural gas production increased by 7.3%.
Canada’s oil industry revenue was:
$93.7 billion in 2020
$174.0 billion in 2021 (increase of 87.5%)
$269.9 billion in 2022 (increase of 49.0%)
That is an increase of $176.2-billion in profit-taking over two years - an amount equivalent to about one-third of the entire federal budget in 2024.
With a population of 40 million, that is an increased cost to each Canadian of CAN $4,405 per person over two years - all while companies were refusing to invest in new production - so no new job creation in the oil patch.
And in all of this, the carbon tax and the federal government are being blamed for inflation by politicians and propagandists being influenced and paid for by oil companies.
The “Existential Threat”
The idea that is pushed by these companies publicly is that oil companies are facing an “existential threat” and will go out of business, when governments seek to impose any constraints at all - like taxes, or regulating responsible corporate behaviour.
The reality is that we need to diversify away from oil and natural gas as an energy source, for many reasons. The reality of climate change is that we have been burning billions and billions of tons of carbon based fuel from under the ground, and steadily adding more and more to the atmosphere. The process and its effects, have been acknowledged as real for more than a century.
No one can deny the productive and world-changing benefits of how, in the last two centuries, we have created new technology and tapped new energy sources and created new chemicals that have had incredible benefits for making life better and more prosperous, but we can’t deny that there are also serious harms and side-effects that have real costs, that everyone else has to pay for.
Aside from long-term environmental damage and changes in climate, there is the fact that our singular dependence on oil means that Canada’s economy is vulnerable to massive shocks when the global players manipulate prices, which delivers shocks to Canada for its currency, investment, lost jobs and lost businesses.
It is not an existential battle for energy companies - they are fighting to maintain what is basically a monopoly in one kind of energy, and the monopolists are using their current profits to maintain their market dominance through any means necessary - price-fixing, collusion, all while running and paying for clandestine campaigns to influence government and the public.
At the end of the day, energy companies can keep doing business, but that business doesn’t include running the government.
All of this demands answers that only a national inquiry with witnesses testifying under oath can explain - specific questions, like which premiers, bureaucrats and prime ministers are supposed to have received TC messaging on government letterhead, just to start.
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