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Last week, the National Post published an op-ed of mine titled, Who is Organizing for Change? In that op-ed, I reported that through Tides Canada, the Wilburforce Foundation has been funding a project called Organizing for Change. One of the activities of this project has been to get people to temporarily join the provincial Liberal Party in order to be able to participate in the vote on Feb. 27, which will determine the next Premier of British Columbia.
The Wilburforce Foundation is funded exclusively, or almost exclusively, by James Letwin, one of the original group behind MICFOSOFT, and his wife. Since 1999, the Letwins have given $80 Million to the Wilburforce Foundation, including nearly $54 Million in MICROSOFT shares.
Today, I noticed that the Wilburforce Foundation has removed a substantial amount of information from its web-site about the purposes for which it has provided money. Examples are shown below of the on-line information that was at the web-site of the Wilburforce Foundation last week, compared to today.
In some cases, what's now missing is telling. For example:
- In a $50,000 grant to Tides USA, Wilburforce removed the words which state that this grant for the Headwaters Initiative was “to support and organize the First nations communities impacted by potential tanker traffic associated with the Enbridge pipeline project in the Great Bear Rainforest.”
- In a $25,000 grant to the Dogwood Initiative, the Wilburforce Foundation removed the words which said that this grant was “to protect the BC coast from the threat of proposed pipeline and tanker projects.”
This isn't the first time that a multi-million dollar or billion-dollar American foundation has removed potentially incriminating on-line information after I raised questions and concerns about the programs that the foundation has been funding in Canada. In fact, this is the fourth time.
- In December, I testified to a House of Commons committee that the Bullitt Foundation had paid the Dogwood Initiative "To expand an outreach campaign to mobilize urban voters for a federal ban on coastal tankers." Shortly after, the Bullitt Foundation simply re-wrote that grant saying that the grant description was "a careless mischaracterization."
- The Rockefeller Brothers Fund removed information from its web-site which stated that it paid Tides Canada “... to educate American tourists and tour operators about the damage being done to Alberta by the unsustainable extraction of tar sands, and by doing so, to increase pressure on Alberta policymakers…”
- The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation quietly re-wrote four grants for $3.6 million for "demarketing" campaigns against B.C. farmed salmon.
Why do American foundation re-write their grants like this?
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