On Sunday, January 20, CBC's The Weekly aired an extensive report on the American funding that has been fuelling pipeline controversy and gridlock in Canada for more than a decade. This activist campaign is called The Tar Sands Campaign and it is a multi-million dollar effort to stop the construction of infrastructure necessary for the development and export of both oil and gas infrastructure from western Canada.
Within days of CBC's show, the organization that has been running this campaign for more than a decade re-wrote its web-site, deleting significant parts of its own description of The Tar Sands Campaign, including admissions about the role of the U.S. funders, the intention to "land-lock" Canadian oil and the influence of this campaign in Canada's 2015 federal election.
When The Tar Sands Campaign first came to light in 2010, little was known about it. In fact, this campaign was only discovered because of three little words, "Tar Sands Campaign," in the U.S. tax returns of The Tides Foundation ("Tides"). Based in San Francisco, Tides operates a donor-advised fund, receiving funds from donors and re-granting them to recipients.
During the early years of The Tar Sands Campaign, the intentions and strategy of the funders was not entirely clear. In 2017, that changed when the organization that has been co-ordinating the campaign, Corporate Ethics International ("CorpEthics"), put a description of its on its web-site.
The Tar Sands Campaign was created with initial funding from The Rockefeller Brothers Fund ("RBF"), one of the philanthropic entities of the famous family that pioneered the American oil industry. In 2007, RBF paid $250,000 to CorpEthics, "to co-ordinate the initial steps of a markets campaign to stem demand for tar sands derived fuels in the United States." CorpEthics wrote the strategy paper for The Tar Sands Campaign and has been running it ever since. Michael Marx, who wrote the original strategy, has been the Executive Director of CorpEthics since The Tar Sands Campaign began.
The original description of The Tar Sands Campaign, published on-line by CorpEthics, stated that "From the very beginning, the campaign strategy was to land-lock the tar sands so their crude could not reach international markets where it could fetch a high price per barrel." CorpEthics has deleted that sentence entirely. Its web-site now states, "As hoped from the beginning, the tar sands campaign spawned a broader and more diverse climate movement that went beyond the tar sands..." CorpEthics now says that since The Tar Sands Campaign began, the climate movement has gone on to "challenge the expansion of U.S. oil production in the Bakken Reserve, oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean, oil fracking in states like New York, California, and Colorado, proposed natural gas and oil pipelines throughout the U.S., as well as the expansion of railroad infrastructure that would accommodate new oil production in the U.S". That's true. But those efforts are barely a whisper compared to the campaign to land-lock Canadian oil and gas.
Corporate Ethics also removed a sentence about the role of the funders of The Tar Sands Campaign. That sentence said, "In 2008 two major U.S. foundations asked CorpEthics to recruit the groups, develop the strategy, create a coordinated campaign, and act as a re-granting agency for the North American Tar Sands Campaign." That revealing sentence has been entirely removed.
To see how the description of The Tar Sands Campaign was originally written, click here. To see how it has been re-written, click here. For a set of pages showing the differences between the original and the re-written versions, click here.