What began as a smear campaign against West Coast Environmental Law and other environmental groups has crossed a line with oil industry advocates EthicalOil.org and Ezra Levant (author of the book Ethical Oil) taking aim at the thousands of ordinary Canadians who have registered to express their concerns about the proposed Northern Gateway Pipelines before the National Energy Board (NEB)/Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency Joint Review Panel (JRP). Ethical Oil and Levant are now calling for direct interference with the public consultation process, which is mandated by Canadian law, to silence those who are lawfully entitled to make submissions on this important issue, and media reports suggest that they have the Prime Minister’s ear.
West Coast Environmental Law has been around since Ezra Levant was a babe in arms. We will survive the slanderous attacks leveled at us by Ezra Levant and Ethical Oil – indeed, the fact that advocates for the oil industry is purchasing these expensive ads to attack us merely shows that they fear our ability to protect the environment through law.
But while we can take it, Ethical Oil is using its attacks on West Coast to cast a shadow over all of the about 4,500 people who have signed up to make their views known at the NEB hearings into the Northern Gateway Pipelines. These people have signed up because they have views on the project, and the high level of public concern, and public engagement, threatens to delay the hearings. This high number of registrants for a process such as this is unprecedented, but also evidence of a healthy democracy.
Ethical Oil says that “many” of these 4,500 people are foreigners and seems to imply that the others have been manipulated by foreigners. Ethical Oil director, Ezra Levant is even more over-the-top:
The world’s Canada-bashers laughed [at the JRP’s openness], then signed up to testify. Almost 5,000 of them. Including Hugo Chavez’s state-owned oil company, CITGO. Including foreigners from Uruguay to Louisiana to Italy to Austria.
Then something really crazy happened. To ensure all those foreigners have time to talk, [JRP panelist] Leggett announced she was adding an extra year to her review.
Who are these supposed ‘foreigners’?
So are the roughly 4,500 people who registered to present (for 10 minutes each) at the JRP hearings really foreigners, or somehow manipulated by “foreign front-groups”, as Ethical Oil would have you believe?
While it’s important to defend the right of non-Canadians to speak on an issue of international significance, Ethical Oil is blatantly misleading the public about the numbers of foreigners registered. The National Energy Board has put all requests to speak on-line, revealing that the vast majority – somewhere in the neighbourhood of 99% – of the registrants are Canadians. A very large proportion are from northern cities and towns of British Columbia – from the very communities most directly affected by the proposed pipelines and tanker traffic. As the Globe and Mail reports, some of them are not usually considered environmentalists, let alone “radicals”.
And the thing is – Ethical Oil and Ezra Levant know that. They couldn’t have found the 1 registration form with an Italian address, or the 1 with a Uruguayan address, or the 1 with an Austrian address (and there is only 1 from each of those countries) without going through lots of applications.
And while Levant may trot out Venezuela’s CITGO as a boogie man, the reality is that the company’s only involvement – whatever one may think of it – was to submit a single, brief letter, questioning the need for the project at this time. They are not among the 4,500 who have asked for a brief opportunity to present to the Panel.
So what about Ethical Oil’s implication that the large numbers of Canadians who signed up were unwittingly duped by foreign interests? We’ve already explained in an earlier post that West Coast Environmental Law is more Canadian than Tim Hortons (which was for a while owned by a U.S. company, but (yeah!) no longer), and no more of a foreign front-group than Ethical Oil itself (less, perhaps).
Exactly how Ethical Oil thinks we duped people into registering to speak is unclear. In actual fact, all we did was let our mostly Canadian supporters and contacts know about the hearings and invite them to consider registering through a website that simplified the registration process (without telling them what they should say if they took part). Oh, and we wrote a backgrounder describing the ways in which the JRP process allows the public to participate.
That’s it. Sound sinister to you? We’re not, of course, single-handedly responsible for the high turn-out, but this basic invitation would have accomplished nothing if there was not already a high level of public interest in the project and appetite on the part of British Columbians and Canadians to make their views known. It is not foreign dollars that have bogged down the JRP process. It is public process about an issue on which there is an extraordinarily high level of public interest. The NEB process is intentionally designed to encourage public engagement. Those who responded signed up to give a 10 minute presentation – that’s all. It’s precisely what the NEB, and the law, invites them to do.
Meanwhile, our friends at Environmental Defence point out that the parties who have “intervened” in the JRP – participating beyond making a brief 10 minute statement – are also largely Canadian (with the notable exception of 10 oil and gas companies headquartered elsewhere in the world).
Whither the truth?
Unfortunately, Ethical Oil’s unfounded attacks on these Canadians appears to be bearing political fruit, with the Prime Minister reporting that he has heard concerns that “foreign money” is being used “to really overload the public consultation phase of regulatory hearings…”, an apparent reference to the almost 4,500 Canadians that want to express their concerns at the JRP hearings.
Imagine that you are an individual concerned about the Enbridge pipeline, who has worked up the courage to sign up to express your concerns at the NEB hearing, as is your democratic and legal right. How will you feel to hear Ezra Levant publicly attacking you as evidence that the system is broken and as a dupe of foreign interests (or (gasp) as a foreigner yourself)? “Are you, or have you ever been, a foreigner or do you associate with organizations that associate with foreigners?”
We hope that the about 4,500 Canadians and (a handful of) non-Canadians will not allow themselves to be intimidated by Ethical Oil’s misinformation campaign. And we hope that the Canadian government will take the time to fact-check the outrageous claims being made (a simple phone call to the National Energy Board ought to do it). And we are confident that Canadians know that inclusive public consultation about divisive issues is a good thing – not evidence of that the process has been hijacked.
