A government is like a sausage. You want some shit in it, but not too much.
—NAZI COLLABORATOR AND FUTURE FIRING SQUAD TARGET PIERRE LAVAL, PREMIER OF VICHY FRANCE
Arthur J. Finkelstein is proud of being called America’s Merchant of Venom. He is one of a growing army of professional strategists who have changed politics from a profession to a game. Politics has never been a calling for the thin-skinned and the empathic, but it used to have some moral standards. And, in the end, people seeking political office did tend to take public service seriously and act as though they were responsible for a sacred trust. Not all of them were as conscientious as Harry Truman, who saw all of the trappings of presidential power as baubles lent to the citizen who holds the job that must be returned upon leaving, but ministers did use to resign in shame for transgressions as minor as being caught in a strip club. People like Finkelstein changed that.
Nowadays, honour is seen as a sign of weakness and honesty is construed as possible disloyalty to the team. Finkelstein, one of the people who is supposed to have inspired Stephen Harper’s combativeness, made his reputation helping Ronald Reagan and the two Bush presidents get elected; he was also one of the strategists who put Benjamin Netanyahu into power in Israel. He first showed up in Canada as an adviser to the National Citizens Coalition, helping with its advocacy ads in the early 1990s, before Stephen Harper was hired to run the mysterious pressure group. Finkelstein, like many other modern political strategists, advocates tough attack advertising against opposing candidates as they appear on the scene, so that their reputation can be poisoned in the public mind before voters get a chance to get to know them.
At least one writer credits Finkelstein with changing the public meaning of the word “liberal” from one of generosity and open-mindedness to recklessness and weakness. It didn’t matter that nineteenth-century liberals favoured free markets and decent wages and working conditions, or that in the twentieth century liberals had led the United States through the two world wars and the Korean War and had got the country mired in Vietnam. They were appeasers, and, when a highly decorated Democrat ran for president, the neo-cons brought out other veterans to ruin his reputation. Nor would the public remember that liberals had led them out of the Great Depression, passed the Civil Rights Act and presided over the transition of the American wartime economy into a consumer-driven behemoth that raised millions of people out of poverty, not only in America, but also all over the world.
Starting in the Reagan years, Democrats would flinch at the word “liberal,” and middle-class voters who had become the wealthiest working people in world history would spit the word out as a political profanity. Liberals would now, in the public mind, be considered wastrels, cowardly in the face of foreign enemies, soft on illegal immigrants, and adopters of pretty much every loony idea that comes along. Unfortunately, some liberals came to believe it, too.1
Finkelstein was in and out of the National Citizens Coalition through Harper’s tenure, working as a political consultant. But, as happens with many of Harper’s close advisers, the two men had a falling out. In the 2002 Conservative leadership campaign, Finkelstein was courted by Stockwell Day but, after talking to National Citizens Coalition staffer Gerry Nicholls, turned Day down. Considering an offer by Day—even though Harper was not yet officially in the race—was, in Harper’s eyes, a grotesque betrayal. He would never work with Finkelstein again, but Harper had already learned a lot about hardball politics.2
Karl Rove—who was, at various times, called the “Architect” and “Turdblossom” by President George W. Bush, but who will likely be best remembered as the father of the modern attack ad—was another influence on Harper and the Canadian right. Rove is a proponent of the politics of deception. He engineered the “Swift boat” campaign that transformed Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry from a decorated war hero to a punch line. “Swiftboating,” the use of outright lies and half-truths backed by a massive amount of advertising and trumpeted by biased media, has become a verb in the political world.
Frank Luntz, a pollster and strategist who prides himself on manipulating language (he was able to remake “inheritance tax” into “death tax” and “health care reform” into “government takeover of health care”) came to Ottawa in 2006 to speak to the right-wing Civitas organization, then delivered a campaign-style tub-thumper to the Conservative caucus on how to win a majority in the next election. Harper told reporters he had known Luntz “for many years,” but denied his party employed the controversial pollster.3
HARPER USED the manipulation of language very well during the 2008–2009 prorogation controversy, when the Liberals and New Democrats sought to form a coalition government, with cabinet ministers from both parties and parliamentary support by the Bloc Québécois. What was a legitimate constitutional option was remade into an attempted coup d’état. “Coalition” became a political obscenity. When used against political opponents it puts candidates on the defensive. Governor General Michaëlle Jean’s decision to shut down Parliament at a time when the prime minister obviously did not have the confidence of the majority of MPs was a huge setback for the supremacy of the elected legislature. It flew in the face of the precedent set in the King-Byng Affair of 1926 when the Governor General forced Prime Minister King to face the music in the House of Commons.
As constitutional scholar Andrew Heard wrote of the Harper-Jean showdown, “By granting prorogation, the Governor General not only allowed the prime minister to escape almost certain defeat in a confidence motion, but she also set the stage for every prime minister to follow suit. With this precedent, any prime minister can demand that the governor general suspend Parliament whenever he or she believes a successful vote of no confidence is imminent.” The whole thing may sound academic, but, for example, Joe Clark would have been able to save his government in 1979 if he’d been able to get the Governor General to shut down Parliament. Instead, he lost a confidence test by just six votes, and Pierre Trudeau was returned to power in the election that followed.4
Harper would shut down Parliament again in December 2009, partly to allow the government to work on security for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. The prestigious Economist observed with appropriate dry wit that Canadian parliamentarians “cannot, apparently, cope with Parliament’s deliberations while dealing with the country’s economic troubles and the challenge of hosting the Olympics.”5
Harper is not an easy man to work for. Gerry Nicholls’s description of toiling with Harper at the National Citizens Coalition is most people’s idea of working for the boss from hell. It appears Harper’s people-handling skills have not improved much. The Prime Minister’s Office has a revolving door. Chiefs of staff, who run the day-to-day operations of the PMO, don’t stay long. Directors of communication hold on for about a year. William Stairs, Harper’s first communications director as prime minister, lasted less than a month. He was forced out when he asked the prime minister for more leeway to deal with the hostile reaction from the media and the public over Harper’s decision to entice former Liberal cabinet minister David Emerson to cross the floor of the House of Commons for a Tory cabinet seat. Stairs believed the bad publicity over Emerson’s appointment had dragged on for weeks because Harper had kept Emerson away from the media, and neither Harper nor Emerson had come close to giving the public a reasonable excuse for what seemed to be an overly cute move. Stairs had set up a phone-in press conference to try to clear the air. Emerson hadn’t shown up, pleading he’d been caught in traffic. A media storyline of a minister-in-hiding turned into one of a minister who supposedly didn’t have a cell phone.6
Harper had eight directors of communications in his first six years in office. For many of them, their biggest problem was that Harper does not actually take communications advice from anyone, except maybe his wife. The prime minister does set the tone, though, for the crowd of frat boys in short pants who work in his office. And they live in a world where, as they walk through the halls covered with pictures of their leader, they are reminded that it’s his will that must be done.
These staffers are not very popular, even in their own party. Keith Beardsley, former deputy chief of staff for issues management to Harper, noticed a distinct distaste among Tory backbench MPs for taking orders from what he called “the boys in short pants.” Even cabinet ministers could not convince the Prime Minister’s Office to reconsider its position on an issue once it had been settled in the boardrooms of the Langevin Block and the talking points had been written by Harper’s people. And there was not a lot of respect on the Hill for Harper’s staffers. “There has been more than one instance within the government of an applicant being interviewed for a junior position in a minister’s office, and being turned down for lack of experience, only to be hired by the PMO and put in charge of the people who had rejected them,” Beardsley wrote in the fall of 2012. “That doesn’t make for a lot of confidence on the ministerial side.”7
Some observers—such as former Harper confidants and staffers Gerry Nicholls, Tom Flanagan, Bob Plamandon and Bruce Carson—have described a prime minister prone to ugly depressions and to frightening and unpleasant mood swings. “He can be suspicious, secretive, and vindictive, prone to sudden eruptions of white hot rage over meaningless trivia, at other times falling into weeklong depressions in which he is incapable of making decisions,” Flanagan wrote in Persona Non Grata: The Death of Free Speech in the Internet Age. Nicholls was a little kinder, telling a reporter, “I would see Stephen sometimes get morose and sad but it never affected his ability to do his job. Yes, sometimes he would get depressed, but he was always a hard worker and always doing his job.”
Bob Plamondon wrote of periods where Harper had “gone dark,” and in The Longer I’m Prime Minister, journalist Paul Wells describes ugly moods that last several hours. Wells quotes an anonymous person who worked with the prime minister saying, “He comes into the office sometimes in a bad mood and that will affect how he sees things throughout the day. And if he comes in a good mood no one can do anything wrong.” The classic example of Harper’s moodiness came during the 2009 prorogation controversy, when Stéphane Dion seemed on the verge of cobbling together a governing coalition. Harper was almost immobilized with shock and depression until Dion made the tactical mistake of including the Bloc Québécois at a press conference announcing the coalition. Harper realized how English Canada would see that, and quickly regained his feet.8
Jason MacDonald, Harper’s communications director in 2014, denied claims that the prime minister had been treated for depression, or that his funk, however it manifested itself, seriously affected his ability to lead the country. “It’s odd that after not having worked on the Hill in almost a decade, and in the context of defending his own outrageous comments on child pornography, Mr. Flanagan comes forward with these ridiculous allegations,” MacDonald said in an email to Parliament Hill reporters. “As the public knows, and as the Prime Minister’s record shows, he’s had no difficulties making decisions in good times or bad.”9
But Harper’s combative nature and his need to pick fights, whether fuelled by depression or by his own personal wiring, could well be the political death of him, Flanagan believes. Taking on people who run the country’s institutions and attacking the officers of Parliament, the Supreme Court, and others who seem to get in his way could eventually cost the Conservatives power. “That narrative is largely built, it’s already there,” Flanagan said at an Ottawa book launch in the spring of 2014, “and that’s pretty dangerous to your continuation in power.”10
POLITICS, POLITICAL PARTIES and elected representatives are pawns in the game. So are the segments of the population that Harper wants as friends and needs as enemies. For, in this type of politics, enemies are important: the base wants to see the destruction of enemies like the media, unions and the courts, and it wants to see some damp scalps. Winning arguments is not enough.
That means the Conservative Party—and, to be fair, the Liberal Party and the New Democratic Party, since they, too, have embraced hardball politics—is a vehicle that is used to win office for a new governing clique. It doesn’t matter what a party stood for in the past. And quite often, it also doesn’t matter what the party stands for now. It’s a machine for raising money, attracting volunteers and hiring people to run a national leader’s tour and country-wide ad campaigns. In a national survey of 1,807 Canadians conducted by the public-interest think tank Samara in 2013, the majority of those polled said political parties exist mainly to get candidates elected. The parties aren’t there to listen to members’ views on how the country should be governed.
Poll respondents weren’t happy with that. They believed “recruiting candidates and competing in elections” should be the least important job for political parties. Only 4 per cent of them ranked it the number one priority, so they’re unlikely to join one. Samara argues that the poll result shows that the focus of political parties on winning elections comes at the expense of real grassroots democracy. Some 69 per cent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that “candidates and political parties are interested only in people’s votes, not their opinions.” If the poll results are extrapolated, more than half of Canadians believe political parties’ first priority should be “reaching out to Canadians,” but the parties were awarded the lowest grade for that work.
Earlier research from Samara showed that Canadians believe a member of Parliament’s most important job was also to “represent the views of constituents,” and again, awarded MPs a failing grade for performance in this area. Together, these two findings send Canada’s political leadership—regardless of party—a dire message: Canadians want to be heard and represented by parties, and they firmly believe this is not happening.11
By and large, the people polled by Samara are right. Political parties are no place for old ladies in tennis shoes who want to dabble in politics. They are magnets for sociopaths attracted by money and power. During the Nixon years, the frat boys who tried to screw their political enemies by both legal and illegal means were called “ratfuckers.” Quite a few still wear that label with some pride.
But to crush your opponents these days, you need money. In the 2006 election, which pitted the wounded government of Paul Martin against a Tory machine that, after years in the wilderness, now saw itself with a shot at power, the Tory campaign managers came across a way to do an end run around election spending rules. The extra money that they raised was used to saturate the country with nasty ads.
This “in and out” scheme was a complicated way to launder money and to allow the Conservatives to outspend Paul Martin. The Tories did not invent it. In 2002, the Bloc Québécois developed a system to cook local riding campaign books to make it look like candidates spent more money than they actually did. Elections Canada then reimbursed about half of that money. With both the Tories and the Bloc, money was paid out to “volunteers” who then donated it back to the party. That way, it looked like the local campaigns were spending, and raising, far more money. The scheme was exposed when the Bloc was stiffed by former MP Jean-Paul Marchand.12 During his failed re-election campaign, he had agreed to push $66,000 through his local bank account and redirect the money to the party’s headquarters. When Marchand didn’t go through with the deal, the Bloc sued him for breach of contract, demanding $36,000. The party won the case, but the judge knocked $20,000 off the debt, leaving Marchand owing just $16,362.13 The Martin government, seeing how the scheme worked, tried to bring in a law against it, but the bill died when the government fell in 2006.
During that election, the Conservatives raised so much money that they couldn’t legally spend all of it on national advertising and campaign staff. The party distributed the cash to riding associations, who kicked it back to headquarters to use it the same way the Bloc had. The Tories took $1.3 million of the $18.3 million they raised, gave it to local candidates, and those candidates then flipped the money back to the national headquarters to use on “local” ads. In fact, they were really national ads, but with a tag line saying the ad was “paid for by … (insert local candidate’s name here).” Elections Canada became suspicious when most of the “local” ad invoices were billed by one firm in Toronto. Under questioning from an Elections Canada investigator, ad executives said they had never worked for local candidates, talked to them or billed them. The Tories denied falsifying documents but would eventually admit to “alterations” to divide up the invoices to be billed to riding associations.
Just a few months into Harper’s first term, Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand said his agency would not pay almost $800,000 in refunds that the riding associations had billed for. The Tories filed a lawsuit for the money, but eventually, Elections Canada won the case. In April 2008, the RCMP and Elections Canada investigators raided Conservative Party headquarters in Ottawa. Someone, likely an Elections Canada staffer, tipped media about the raid, and Tories were horrified to see it on the television news networks. A House of Commons committee began an investigation of the “in and out” scandal, but the Tories engaged in a series of stall tactics. The committee chair, Tory Gary Goodyear (a future Harper minister), was so dedicated to not getting to the bottom of the scandal that his fellow MPs passed a vote of non-confidence against him.
On February 24, 2011, four Conservative national strategists were charged with overspending over one million dollars in the 2006 election. They were also accused of submitting “false or misleading” documents to Elections Canada. Just over a year later, they made a plea deal in which the Tories agreed to repay $230,000 in taxpayer money and pay $55,000 in fines in return for the dropping of charges against individual party strategists. To the Tories, this was “vindication,” despite the fact that Elections Canada had proven that the party had cheated in the election that brought it to power. The fact that Elections Canada had investigated the scheme added yet one more reason for Harper to hold a grudge against the agency and its head, Mayrand. Eventually, accounts would be settled.
BUT OTHERS WOULD FEEL the sting first. KAIROS is an international aid organization run by the Anglican Church of Canada, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada, the Presbyterian Church in Canada, the United Church of Canada, the Quakers, the Mennonite Central Committee of Canada and several Roman Catholic bodies including the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops. Those churches chipped in to pay and manage KAIROS’s good works in poor countries. Near the end of September 2009, the president of the Canadian International Development Agency recommended KAIROS receive $7,098,758 to help pay for its foreign aid work. Two months later, Bev Oda, the minister responsible for CIDA, signed the recommendation, but supposedly changed it to say KAIROS should “not” get the money, and a few days later signed a letter to KAIROS telling the church group that its foreign projects would not get funding.
KAIROS’s supporters said the agency was under attack because the Harper government believed it was anti-Israel. Jason Kenney, the minister of citizenship and immigration, had told an Israeli audience in the fall of 2009 that the Harper government would stop giving money to any group that was anti-Semitic. In KAIROS’s case, Kenney told the Israelis, the group was engaged in the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel, an accusation KAIROS denied. Over the next year, Oda’s claim that she had denied KAIROS funding because the agency didn’t meet CIDA criteria fell apart. CIDA officials confirmed that they not only approved the grant, but wanted to increase the amount KAIROS got from the government. In 2010, testifying at a parliamentary committee, Oda denied adding the word “not” to the CIDA document. House of Commons Speaker Peter Milliken ruled that the document had been deliberately tampered with by mysterious and unknown persons. The issue dragged on through parliamentary hearings, where Oda denied the document had been changed by Kenney or someone in the Prime Minister’s Office. Then, in February 2011, Oda admitted she had told someone in her office to alter the recommendation.14
If that’s confusing to you, don’t be alarmed. Dozens of people who are paid to understand this stuff could not keep the lies, half-truths, semi-denials and spin straight, either.
The government also went after the women’s group MATCH, which operated in the Third World, and an organization called the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, which was attacked by the PMO for its stance on Israel. A few hours after one particularly nasty meeting in January 2010, Rémy Beauregard, the organization’s president, died of a heart attack. Two years later, Harper shut the agency down.
Academics also came under fire from the PMO and the Tories. Two University of Ottawa law professors who wrote critical newspaper opinion pieces believe the Tories were responsible for Access to Information requests probing their university expense accounts. (The University of Ottawa refuses to divulge the names of the people who asked for the data.) And when a University of Ottawa history professor wrote an op-ed piece opposing Harper’s “Quebec is a Nation” resolution, Marjory LeBreton, the Conservatives’ leader in the Senate, wrote a letter to chancellor Huguette Labelle demanding the professor be brought to heel. The university told LeBreton to take a hike: “Universities have faculty members who are outspoken on a whole range of issues,” David Mitchell, vice-president of university relations, wrote to LeBreton. “And they have the freedom to do so.” So LeBreton wrote a nasty letter to the Ottawa Citizen, which published it.15
And Harper’s team doesn’t like artists much, either, especially when they get in the way of the agendas of big corporations. Lobbyists in Ottawa make more money from arguing the case of big business on copyright law changes than from any other issue. In 2011, the Canadian Conference of the Arts learned that its $390,000-a-year grant from the federal government would be cut. It was about 75 per cent of the arts group’s income. The Canadian Conference of the Arts asked the Harper government for a one-time grant of just under $800,000 to help it set up a fundraising system to ease it through the transition to a privately funded agency. The Department of Canadian Heritage offered about one-quarter of that amount, telling the arts group to use the money to wind up its operations. Why was the group, which cost very little, was praised by bureaucrats for being careful with its money and represented a wide swath of the arts—including the National Ballet of Canada; Royal Conservatory of Music; Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists; and the National Theatre School—effectively put out of business? Partly, said observers, because the Canadian Conference of the Arts opposed changes to copyright law that, it said, would cost its members and other Canadian artists $126 million a year.16
In 2010, the government pulled funding from the Toronto theatre and music festival SummerWorks because it booked a play that was attacked by pro-government bloggers and conservative journalists for supposedly glorifying terrorism. SummerWorks was hit hard by the yanking of its grant, since money from the federal government covered about 20 per cent of its expenses. (The federal grant was restored in 2012.)17
Protesters saw the nasty side of the Harper government during the June 2010 G20 heads of government meeting in Toronto, when more than 1,100 people were arrested and held in pens at a fetid makeshift jail on Eastern Avenue. It was the largest mass arrest in Ontario history. Police even went into areas that were, supposedly, set aside for peaceful protest. Alok Mukherjee, chair of the Toronto Police Services Board, believes the RCMP took over Toronto that weekend and, along with 10,000 Ontario Provincial Police officers who arrived in the city on the second day of the protests, used the G20 protest as a pretext to sweep the streets of people. Several journalists were arrested, as were bystanders. The police were given extra powers under a secret regulation drafted by the Ontario Liberal provincial government. In the end, 800 people were released without charge after spending hours or days locked in pens. It was one of the post-9/11 police actions, like those in Ferguson, Missouri, in the summer of 2014, that caused people on both sides of the political spectrum to worry that the police have become too militarized and politicized. In the end, the gross violations of Torontonians’ civil rights likely contributed to the police chief, Bill Blair, losing his job in 2014.
And the Harper frat boys don’t always hide behind the cops. At the 2006 Liberal leadership convention, Tories tried to make sure that the man they most feared, Bob Rae, was not elected leader of the Liberal Party. James Moore, the long-time citizenship minister, was put in charge of screwing Rae. He showed up at the convention to hand out buttons saying “Make Bob the first NDP prime minister” and “Vote Bob. Who needs Ontario?” He later told reporters, “There’s a reason we handed out so many of these. The Liberals don’t know how to play poker.” Doug Finley, one of the campaign strategists who would soon be charged in the “in and out” money laundering scandal, forged a fake Conservative memo that was leaked to newspapers. The note said the party was terrified of Michael Ignatieff and wanted Bob Rae to win. (In the end, the Liberals chose Stéphane Dion.)18
But if you really want to anger this government, try blocking one of the oil industry’s projects. Opponents of the Keystone XL oilsands bitumen pipeline between Hardisty, Alberta, and Steele City, Nebraska, and the Northern Gateway—a $6-billion, 1,200-kilometre pipeline between Bruderheim, Alberta, and Kitimat, B.C.—say these pipelines would harm the environment.
Northern Gateway opponents have been targeted by Canada’s police and intelligence agencies. The National Energy Board is supposed to be an objective tribunal that listens fairly to all sides of the pipeline debate. Sheila Leggett, who was heading a panel studying the feasibility of the Northern Gateway pipeline, had the RCMP and CSIS investigate environmental and First Nations opponents of the plan. She did it even though she had already been told by the RCMP that there was no evidence of lawbreaking by any of the Northern Gateway opponents.19
CSIS and the RCMP spied on the Sierra Club, the Forest Ethics Advocacy Association and the Council of Canadians. The National Energy Board’s security division, the RCMP and CSIS agents poked though YouTube videos, Facebook accounts, and monitored websites such as rabble.ca and genuinewitty.com and Twitter users like poormansmedia. What’s even more outrageous, they even spied on Green Party leader Elizabeth May, telling the National Energy Board that she had spoken at a rally of Northern Gateway opponents.
“This is not what you do in a free society,” May said in an interview with the online publication Blacklock’s Reporter, which broke the story of the Energy Board’s spy campaign. “Nobody is threatening them, but the National Energy Board is still acting as though legitimate public participation in their hearings represents some kind of threat. That’s deeply troubling. The implication of the National Energy Board contacting the RCMP and CSIS because these people may interfere with hearings is disturbing and antidemocratic,” May said. “A regulator is supposed to be independent of one interest group or the other. A regulator is supposed to have an open mind. A regulator should not be concerned with groups that oppose a proposal—especially when the RCMP tell them there is no security threat.”20
She is convinced the country’s intelligence agencies were spying on her, and other environmentalists, long before Stephen Harper became prime minister. “I always assumed so,” she said, when asked whether she knew CSIS was watching her. “And I assumed so before Stephen Harper, and I’m trying to get access to my CSIS file because I believe it would be interesting. I assume that anyone who does any public activism in this country, given the scope of the anti-terrorism laws passed after 9/11, is being watched.” May said the British newspaper The Guardian got briefing notes written for the energy companies by CSIS, the RCMP and the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), which is only supposed to spy on people outside Canada. “That means they’re also doing foreign spying, as well as domestic spying, probably spying on environmentalists and Indigenous groups in other countries,” May said.21
IN FEBRUARY 2014, the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, on behalf of the groups targeted by CSIS and the RCMP, filed complaints against the investigators. Josh Paterson, executive director of the civil liberties group, said, “There are things in the documents that are very suggestive of covert means being used. We can’t conclude that because there’s things blacked out … That’s why we’re asking for an investigation. What we’re hoping here is to find out more about what’s happening.”
Paterson said the spies passed on the information to Enbridge, the company that wants to build the pipeline. The civil liberties group was leaked an agenda for a “classified briefing for energy and utilities sector stakeholders” that was held by Natural Resources Canada, with presentations by RCMP and CSIS representatives. The BCCLA charged that the information that CSIS and the RCMP gave to the National Energy Board could “compromise these groups’ ability to participate fully and effectively before the NEB.”
Tory cabinet minister Joe Oliver tried to run interference for the government. “The safety of Canadians is a priority for our government. As part of its commitment to safety, the National Energy Board may conduct a security assessment prior to a regulatory hearing,” he said. “The NEB will often work with the RCMP to protect the safety of everyone involved. Neither I, nor any member of my department, gave instructions to any federal agency in this matter.”22
The government tried to strengthen its case with a memo, written to the National Energy Board by Tim O’Neil, senior criminal intelligence research specialist with Federal Policing Criminal Operations at RCMP headquarters in Ottawa, that warned it was “highly likely” oilsands opponents would break the law or threaten regulators. Strangely, O’Neil added, the Mounties couldn’t find evidence of a “direct or specific criminal threat.”
The O’Neil memo, dated April 19, 2013, was released to the media through Access to Information. The memo continued:
Opponents of the oil sands have used a variety of protest actions to draw attention to the oil sands’ negative environmental impact, with the ultimate goal of forcing the shutdown of the Canadian petroleum industry. The anti-petroleum and anti-nuclear movement has attempted to interfere within the federal regulatory hearings and have used coordinated/mass interventions that have at times bogged down the regulatory hearings. In response, the federal government has instituted new regulatory procedures that will limit who may make formal presentations at the National Energy Board’s public hearings … It is the focus of attention by many anti-oil sands, anti-Canadian petroleum and anti-petroleum pipeline operations, and it is highly likely that the National Energy Board may expect to receive threats to its hearings and its board members.23
Pipeline opponents were not really too surprised that the National Energy Board was in bed with CSIS and the RCMP. They knew an oil lobby group co-founded by Douglas Black, a Tory senator from Alberta, wrote the 2012 law that requires people who want to speak at National Energy Board hearings to prove they have “relevant information or expertise” and are “directly affected” by a proposed development. Clayton Ruby, counsel for the Forest Ethics Advocacy Association, said the wording of the amendments to the National Energy Board Act buried in the federal budget omnibus bill looks just like a passage in a 2012 report by the Energy Policy Institute of Canada. Enbridge, Imperial Oil, Rio Tinto Alcan, and Canadian Energy Pipeline Association were founding members of the Energy Policy Institute.
“The government is totally in the hands of the oil industry,” Ruby said in the fall of 2013. “They are two sides of the same face.” His client sued the federal department National Resources Canada in Federal Court, saying that the rule change violated Charter-protected free speech. The Forest Ethics Advocacy Association wanted the right to argue against Enbridge’s Trailbreaker project, a pipeline that would carry Alberta bitumen from Sarnia, Ontario, to a refinery in Montreal.24
Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver then went after James Hansen, a former NASA scientist, for saying expansion of Alberta oilsands projects means “game over for the climate.” Hansen had also called the Harper team a desperate and “Neanderthal” government. Oliver, on a trip to Washington to lobby for the Keystone XL pipeline, warned Hansen would regret his comments.
On CBC Radio’s Saturday morning political show The House, Hansen lashed out at Oliver for saying scientists who oppose oilsands expansion are “crying wolf.” Hansen, unlike many Canadian scientists, refused to be muzzled. Oliver, he said, was “beginning to get worried because the [U.S.] secretary of state, John Kerry, is well-informed on the climate issue and he knows that his legacy and President Obama’s is going to depend upon whether they open this spigot to these very dirty, unconventional fossil fuels. We can’t do that without guaranteeing disasters for young people and future generations. The current government is a Neanderthal government on this issue, but Canada can actually be a leader.” Hansen said British Columbia’s carbon tax is a positive step. “I have hopes that Canada will actually be a good example for the United States but the present government is certainly not. They’re in the hip pocket of the fossil fuel industry, as you can see, but that doesn’t mean that the Canadian people are,” Hansen told the radio audience.25 These were just the kind of comments that would cause apoplexy to such oilsands cheerleaders as Harper’s Prime Minister’s Office, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the Sun News Network, and Ethical Oil author Ezra Levant. He and his fans started an association with the same name to push the idea that Canadian oil was not only safely available to the United States, but that the profits from our oil do not go to fund oppression and war. Opponents on both sides of the border said the environmental damage and the risk of pipeline spills did not outweigh the national security benefits of Canadian oil.
WHILE CSIS and the RCMP don’t give opponents of the Harper government the full bare-light-bulb-and-electrodes secret police treatment, Ottawa does have ways of making their lives miserable. For one thing, they can audit critics’ tax returns, take away any charitable status and intimidate donors. Normally, the Canada Revenue Agency audits about 10 per cent of the country’s charities, about eight hundred groups, every year. Under Canadian law, charities can’t use more than 10 per cent of their money for advocacy or politics. Those charities that can’t give tax deduction receipts have a very hard time raising money. In the 2012 budget, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty set aside $8 million to pay for extra audits of environmental groups to determine whether they should be stripped of their charitable status. If they lost that status, the environmental groups would no longer be able to issue tax deduction receipts to donors, which would severely hurt their ability to raise money. The audits targeted the David Suzuki Foundation, Tides Canada, West Coast Environmental Law, The Pembina Foundation, Environmental Defence, Équiterre, the writers’ group PEN Canada and Ecology Action Centre. Also targeted were OXFAM and Amnesty International, two foreign aid groups that many Tories consider too left-wing.
John Bennett, head of Sierra Club Canada, called the audits “a war against the [environmental] sector … We have an important role to play in our society and we want to play that role,” said Bennett. “But we need a governing system that actually welcomes public dialogue instead of discouraging it.” Ross McMillan, CEO of Tides Canada, told CBC news he blamed the audits on Ethical Oil. People working for the pro-oilsands group had said publicly that its lawyers had filed complaints to the Canada Revenue Agency about Tides Canada, The David Suzuki Foundation and Environmental Defence.26
Why would the government go after environmental organizations, especially those that oppose oil pipelines? To thwart terrorism, of course. At least that’s what Finance Minister Jim Flaherty argued when he brought down the 2014 budget. And, in the same breath, he said the taxman, not the Harper government, decides who will be audited. “We don’t choose who is audited by the CRA [Canada Revenue Agency]. That’s up to the CRA,” Flaherty said. “We do give policy direction, and one of the policy directions is that charities are not to be permitted to accept money from terrorist organizations in Canada.” Flaherty was asked about the audit of environmental groups, but he stuck to the terrorism talking points.
“Charities are not to be permitted to accept money from sources that are illegal. We also have FINTRAC [the agency that’s supposed to fight money laundering and other criminal cash transfers], which reports to parliament through me and it tracks transactions from around the world … I think if Canadians give money to charity they expect it to be for charitable uses and not other uses,” Flaherty said. In another speech, he warned: “If I were an environmental charity using charitable money, tax-receipted money, for political purposes, I would be cautious.” And he told reporters: “The concern though remains the same, that there are some terrorist organizations, there are some organized crime organizations that launder money through charities and that make donations to charities and that’s not the purpose of charitable donations in Canada, so we are being increasingly strict on the subject.”27
New Democrat Murray Rankin said the audits are politically motivated.
These environmental groups have gone through super audits—not the usual routine CRA audits, the most rigorous auditing by the CRA. This is the “A team” that comes into town from Ottawa, sent to rattle the cages. They [the CRA] haven’t found anything yet, but they have cost these groups an incredible amount of money in audit fees—which takes the spending away from what the groups are supposed to do, which is environmental education and advocacy. This a serious allegation—to use the state tax system against government opponents. But the dots are starting to connect, especially combined with the BC Civil Liberties Association’s allegations against CSIS and the RCMP.28
Soon afterwards, environmentalists got their hands on a copy of a government strategy document that calls First Nations, environmentalists, the media and competing industry groups “enemies.” The document, with interesting frankness, describes the supposedly neutral National Energy Board as an “ally,” along with oil and gas companies, industry associations, the government of Alberta and several Canadian government departments including Natural Resources Canada, the Aboriginal and Northern Affairs Department, Environment Canada and the Privy Council Office. The strategy plan was written in 2011. It describes how European politicians, “especially from the ruling and influential parties” should be targeted by government-paid lobbyists. The Europeans would be pressured to oppose climate-change policies that would require Canadian oilsands operations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. “While Europe is not an important market for oilsands-derived products, Europe legislation/regulation, such as the EU Fuel Quality Directive, has the potential to impact the industry globally,” said the document, which was obtained by Climate Action Network Canada.29
Sometimes, the Tories are able to convince opposition MPs to support their censorship and Harper’s attacks on environmentalists. For example, Green Party leader Elizabeth May was the only MP to vote against second-reading approval of a bill that makes it nearly impossible for environmentalists to photograph the annual Atlantic coast seal hunt. In May 2014, MPs voted 258 to 1 to extend a security cordon around the killing zones to 1.6 kilometres from the previous 900 metres. “It’s an issue that has been deliberately polarized,” May said. “It puts virtually every MP in the House of Commons on the wrong side of the majority of public opinion across Canada.” Conservative MP Greg Kerr, who sponsored Bill C-555, admitted the law targets critics of the hunt who would “disrupt the industry.” The law allows the RCMP to arrest everyone but sealers or federally licensed “observers” within the hunt area. Observer permits only cost $25, but the Department of Fisheries has refused licences to news photographers, animal rights protesters and the European Union environment commissioner. “For decades now there have been many radical groups that have wanted to disrupt the seal hunt,” Kerr, MP for West Nova, Nova Scotia, said in the House of Commons. “Any person failing to respect the condition of the licence can indeed be fined or arrested.”30
Censorship can be as blatant as banning photographers from the seal hunt with a law passed in open Parliament or as subtle as a few well-placed phone calls. Reporters who have broken stories about the Harper Tories have been subjected to the full force of the conservative media and blogosphere. In addition, perhaps even more damaging, their bosses often get veiled threats from the prime minister’s operatives. Those kinds of complaints, which can be career-killers, used to be fairly common in small-town media and more rare in the national press, but now they’re common everywhere.
In October 2012, Jill Winzoski, a reporter at the Selkirk Record in Manitoba, was fired because one of the owners of the Record and Winzoski’s editor got an email from Tory MP James Bezan complaining about her “biased” reporting. “This MP has complained about my articles for a while now, pulling his advertising from the Record and other local papers over news stories or letters to the editor that were critical of the federal government. I was instructed about six months ago to refrain from any articles about the federal government, and complied—albeit with some degree of disgust—in the interest of keeping my job,” Winzoski told columnist Michael Harris, who took up her case. Her real crime seems to have been signing a petition against the proposed takeover of the Nexen oil company by the state-owned China National Oil Company, a policy issue that was extremely unlikely to make the pages of the Selkirk Record.31
Stephen Maher and Glen McGregor, the reporters who broke the robocalls voter suppression story (McGregor also had the scoop on Senator Mike Duffy’s housing claims), got the full Harper Machine gears. On Sun News Network, Ezra Levant came very close to saying Maher had once been kicked out of a conservative conference for being drunk. (In fact, he had mistakenly gone to a private party in a downtown Ottawa club that had been rented for the evening). Brian Lilley said on the Sun News Network show Byline that McGregor had worked as a DJ at a downtown Ottawa strip club (a job McGregor did have in university) and told his viewers that McGregor’s mother, who had recently died of cancer, had worked for the New Democrats. Both reporters have been subjected to ugly personal attacks by members of the Blogging Tories.
Some Hill reporters say they’ve been targeted by calls to their bosses, but few are willing to go into detail out of fear of getting into hot water with their employers and stirring up more trouble with the Tories. The calls—and reporters in the Parliamentary Press Gallery say they are common—are often made by low-level media relations flacks who, years ago, would never have poked their heads up. One or two of these calls, if made to relatively brave news executives, won’t cause many problems. But a steady stream of them can be corrosive to a journalist’s reputation and career. Eventually, it becomes easier to just transfer the reporter to another beat.
That kind of pressure results in self-censorship, the most effective kind of news control. The science of self-censorship has been known for years: World War II press censors relied on it to keep journalists in line. In Canada, reporters, many of whom are neither particularly bright nor heroic, learn fast that the safe course is also the easiest and the least stressful. Reporters who go years without complaints about their accuracy or bias are the kind of people who are promoted into news media management, making it even easier for flacks and politicians to turn off the information taps.