Rethink Campaigns

"Canada is quietly surpassing the U.S. as the land of opportunity..." says The Washington Times

From Go north, young man, go north by James A. Bacon. Published in The Washington Times, January 4, 2011.

"Unless the Winter Olympics are on television or someone is clubbing baby seals, Americans don't pay much attention to what's happening in Canada. It's as if we live in a house with a set of quiet, orderly neighbors on one side and a bachelor pad with drunken parties, girls in the hot tub and occasional gunshot eruptions on the other. To whom would you pay more attention?

I dare say Americans could correctly name the president of Mexico (Filipe Calderon) over the prime minister of Canada (Stephen Harper) by a margin of 5-to-1. That's too bad. While we have every reason to fear the disorder spilling over from our increasingly lawless neighbor to the south, our well-mannered Canadian neighbors have pulled their act together. We could learn a lot from them..."

To continue reading, please click here. In the discussion, a reader mentions the demarketing of Alberta oil (Demarketing Alberta).

"A careless mischaracterization," says the Bullitt Foundation about its own grant to the Dogwood Initiative "to mobilize urban voters for a federal ban on coastal tankers"

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In December, I testified to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Energy Security in Canada that the Bullitt Foundation, an American foundation, paid the The Dogwood Initiative "... to mobilize urban voters for a federal ban on coastal tankers."  I also reported this in op-eds published in The Financial Post and in The Vancouver Sun.  To my surprise, over the holidays, I happened to notice that this grant was re-written at some point in December - after my testimony and my op-eds were published.

Today, I spoke with Dennis Hayes at the Bullitt Foundation in order to inquire about why the Bullitt Foundation re-wrote that grant.  I was told that after seeing that grant reported in the news, the Bullitt Foundation reviewed the original proposal from the Dogwood Initiative, and decided that the grant should be re-written in order to provide "this seemed a more accurate characterization" of the grant.  

The Bullitt Foundation declined to make public a copy of the Dogwood Initiative's original proposal.

The Bullitt Foundation isn't the only American foundation that has re-written a grant after concerns and questions were raised about a US-funded campaign in Canada. The Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation which re-wrote four grants for $3.6 million for "demarketing" campaigns (Farmed and Dangerous and Pure Salmon)  against farmed salmon.