TransCanada astroturfers

TransCanada has dumped its US pr firm Edelman 10 days after the Greenpeace leak of documents outlining their joint dodgy strategy to use third party front groups to aggressively attack opponents of the Energy East pipeline, and to do and say what “TransCanada can’t" :

"TransCanada immediately denied it had implemented those tactics, which were widely criticized."

The leaked docs - some adorned with the TransCanada logo - date back to May and include various tactics for targeting opponents like Council of Canadians using forty Edelman employees and nine TransCanada staffers.

TransCanada referred to the "controversy" as "a distraction" and said they would like a do over now please : "We are therefore starting a fresh conversation."

"In the current environment, we can't have the respectful conversation that we want to have with Canadians and Quebecers about Energy East," TransCanada spokesman Tim Duboyce said Wednesday in a release. h/t CBC

Quite. 

About Edelman's astroturfing, which they describe as "third party support" and "an echo chamber of aligned voices"...

Edelman's pointman for TransCanada "Grassroots Advocacy Vision" astroturf is Mike Krempasky from their DC office. As documented by Greenpeace, Mr.Krempasky - Tea Party promoter and co-founder of RedState.com - previously had a pretty good run using fake grassroots paid bloggers in their folksy Wal-Marting Across America campaign before one was outed as working for the US Treasury and another a staffer at Washington Post.

Greenpeace astroturf backgrounder :

"Krempasky’s Energy East “Pressure” team includes Brian McNeill ... director of opposition research for Senator John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign. McNeill made national news when it was revealed that he was one of three Edelman employees who were authoring all of the blogs ..." 

on yet another Wal-Mart fluffer campaign. Meanwhile ...

"Edelman was paid $51.9 million to run the American Petroleum Institute’s (API) public relations campaign, which has involved Edelman managing multiple websites and online advertising efforts asking officials to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, support tax deductions for the oil industry and expand access for drilling on public lands.
Central to this strategy is the pro-oil group “Energy Citizens”, which was unveiled as an API-sponsored astroturf group by Greenpeace USA. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers recently launched its own version of Energy Citizens in Canada."

So despite CEO Richard Edelman statement in August in response to separate allegations regarding their work with climate change deniers that :

"We do not work with astroturf groups"

let's have a quick look at Energy Citizens Canada, launched by CAPP, and presumed sister site to the US Energy Citizens, launched by the American Petroleum Institute in 2009.

So far the Canadian version seems to be mostly about harvesting emails of future possible tarsands flufferbots.
As encouragement, the Spotlight on Energy Citizens page profiles Energy Citizens Brittany Allison and Hardave Birk.

Brittany Allison was "a Policy Researcher in the Prime Minister’s Office in Ottawa" and a "Research Officer in the B.C. Legislature in Victoria", prior to her work as Public Affairs Advisor for Fraser Surrey Docks LP, "working to gain federal approval for a coal expansion project".


Currently Ms Allison is Manager of the astroturf tarsands site, British Columbians for Prosperity. 

btw Is CBC Power and Politics regular Alise Mills still the "Media Relations Director" for BC4P?
Will she still write columns for 24 Hours, just bought out by PostMedia, with the bi-line :
"Alise Mills is a political commentator who speaks for British Columbians for Prosperity. Visit moneytrail.ca."

The only other Citizen Spotlight candidate so far is former president of University of Calgary Students Union, Hardave Birk, whose's bio notes he is legislative assistant to Senator Doug Black.

While in no way a reflection upon Mr. Birk, this seems as good a time as any to remind ourselves that prior to becoming Senator Black, Doug Black was president of industry lobby group Energy Policy Institute of Canada, or EPIC, where he worked with vice-chairs Bruce Carson, Gerry Protti and Daniel Gagnier on a national energy program representing their 38 energy member organizations, including TransCanada and CAPP.

Two years ago EPIC put out a presser taking credit for how they have shaped current Con policy on property rights, pipelines, public participation, and First Nations :

"Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver announced legislative changes that would put EPIC's recommendations into federal law. Regulatory changes within omnibus Bill C-38 reflect recommendations of EPIC surrounding regulatory streamlining." 

"You are the secret sauce," Doug Black once wrote to Bruce Carson, whose trial on illegal lobbying and influence peddling will not begin till September next year.

More Insider Tarsands Astroturf.  We are awash in the stuff.

Update : Energy Citizens Canada has just added another "Featured Citizen" to their Spotlight : Alishia Klein, Communications Coordinator at Canadian Natural Resources Limited.

Upperdate : Astroturf  Illustrated!

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Chris Alexander, Minister of IMPs and ICTs

When Jason Kenney grandly announced his new temporary foreign worker program reforms last week - Putting Canadians First! - he slyly handed off the greater part of his troubles to Chris Alexander - Minister of Gollumization, Citizenship, and Immigration - and now also Minister of IMPs and ICTs.  

We don't hear much about IMPs (outside of childrens' books) - the International Mobility Program under which the majority of workers enter Canada. They do not have to pass a labour market test (LMIA) to determine whether they will be putting Canadians out of work because, as our new MinIMP explained, the program is intended to benefit not individual businesses by filling specific jobs, but rather "Canada as a whole".

Via Kenney's ministry, Employment and Social Development Canada :

Of the 221,273 foreign nationals who entered Canada in 2013, 38% came in under the TFWP, but 62% came in under the IMP - 83,740 vs 137,533

Then there's the ICTs - Intra-Company Transfers - also not reliant on LMIAs to safeguard Canadian jobs because they were created to allow multinational corps to move their skilled workers easily from country to country.

You may recall this whole TFW fiasco first blew up in the public eye because the Royal Bank farmed out part of its IT work to iGATE, a company that straddles US, Canada and India, who then cycled its workers in and out of Canada for training by RBC staffers they would later replace under an intra-company transfer. 
As RBC CEO Gord Nixon explained at the time, only one of them came into Canada as a TFW, and besides, RBC "does not get involved in the hiring practices of the companies it hires."

In BC, eight US construction workers were granted entry to BC by the CBSA under an ICT after a US company got the contract to build a wood-waste storage building near Prince George. These "specialized workers" included a former rancher and an apprentice roofer and produce clerk. Yea NAFTA! and all that, but don't we have enough ranchers, apprentice roofers, and produce clerks looking for any kind of work in Canada already?

Asked about the union-backed court case protesting import of the eight US workers, Kenney referred reporters to Chris Alexander, but a year ago he stated : "The obligations we have have for intra-company transfers are often hard-wired into trade agreements."

G&M, May 17, 2014 :

"The final text of the much-vaunted Canada-European Union free trade agreement (CETA) is expected to include a list of occupations that can be fast-tracked into Canada and would allow European firms to bring European workers into Canada through inter-company transfers ...  

The Conservative government has described the deal’s provisions for temporary entry of labour as “the most ambitious ever in a free trade agreement.”

Still you can't please everyone.

B.C.’s deputy premier and natural gas development minister Rich Coleman is worried Canada is going to "fail" if companies cannot hire temporary foreign workers for the 100,000 jobs needed to develop LNG export projects on the coast.

The Kitimat LNG project is co-owned by Canadian branches of U.S. energy giants Chevron Corp. and Apache Corp. Will they be bringing in their own workers?
TransCanada, once billed in the US as "an American company with operations in Canada", is slated to build a $1.9-billion pipeline link for Kitimat LNG project. 

In February Mr. Coleman announced there was "no question the industry will be looking to foreign workers to get up and running", and in March he touted the importance of being on 

"a continent with a lot more people south to us ... so we have access to other skilled labour on the continent and there are people who are very good at doing certain jobs - specialized welders." 

One presumes he isn't referring to the TransCanada welders on the southern leg of the Keystone XL Canada to Texas project : 

"Over 72 per cent of welds required repairs during one week. In another week, TransCanada stopped welding work after 205 of 425 welds required repair.

Inspections by the safety agency found TransCanada wasn’t using approved welding procedures to connect pipes, the letter said. The company had hired welders who weren’t qualified to work on the project because TransCanada used improper procedures to test them."

So. PM-hopeful Jason Kenney's TFW Program "will now refer to only those streams under which foreign workers enter Canada at the request of employers following approval through a new Labour Market Impact Assessment." 
For everything else - the difficult politically damaging bits - there's the guy wearing the IMP ears.
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Bad week for tarsands astroturf

"British Columbians for International Prosperity is an independent group of concerned citizens looking to promote practical resource development, international trade expansion, manufacturing development, and other initiatives bringing prosperity to British Columbia, Canada, and our Global partners."

Dear retired oil execs*: Don't run astroturf ads under the rubric "independent group of concerned citizens" unless you feel like disclosing who those other concerned citizens are and who made and paid for the glitzy ad you just shot in my back yard. 

Also, about your claim that Canada pipeline companies have a 99.9% safety record :

Exxon Confirms Ruptured Pipeline in Ark. Carried Canadian Dilbit

"A pipeline that ruptured and leaked at least 80,000 gallons of oil into central Arkansas on Friday was transporting a heavy form of crude from the Canadian tar sands region, ExxonMobil told InsideClimate News. 

Local police said the line gushed oil for 45 minutes before being stopped,according to media reports."

 A 2010 spill in Michigan, which released a million gallons of dilbit in the Kalamazoo River and has cost pipeline operator Enbridge more than $820 million, continues to challenge scientists and regulators as they work on removing submerged oil from the riverbed."

National Resources Defense Council :

"The [Arkansas] Pegasus tar sands pipeline rupture adds to growing evidence that tar sands poses additional risks to our nation’s pipelines and communities.… While U.S. regulators don’t differentiate between tar sands pipelines and conventional crude pipelines, states with pipelines that have moved the largest volumes of tar sands diluted bitumen for the longest period of time – North Dakota, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan – have spilled 3.6 times as much crude per pipeline mile as the national average.

Tar sands diluted bitumen is substantially different from the conventional crude historically moved on the U.S. pipeline system. It is a combination of heavier than water bitumen tar sands and light, toxic natural gas liquids or other petrochemical diluents. Together, this mix is called diluted bitumen, a substance that is fifty to seventy times thicker than conventional crudes like West Texas Intermediate (North America’s benchmark crude) and moves at higher pipeline temperatures "

British Columbians for International Prosperity Executive Director Bruce Lounds really is a concerned citizen of course. His concern is that approval of TransCanada Corp's Keystone XL pipeline running from the tarsands to Texas will cut BC out of Enbridge's proposed Northern Gateway pipeline action :

Keystone XL Environmental Approval Bad for BC

“B.C. stands to lose a lot should the project go ahead,” Lounds said. “If Keystone is approved, our province will be left on the sidelines, looking in on prosperity and job creation from the outside. Make no mistake, B.C. stands to be a big loser if this project goes ahead.”

A Bad Week for the Tarsands :  Shit Harper Did

* h/t Reddit for http://i.imgur.com/kbepooq.gif

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4 pm Update : Whoa! Aerial footage of Arkansas pipeline spill from videojournalist Adam Randall.
[h/t Toe at Bread and Roses] Go to full screen.



Well so much for keeping the dilbit out of the lake. Plus ...

Think Progress : "A technicality has spared Exxon from having to pay any money into the fund that will be covering most of the clean up costs of its Arkansas pipeline spill. ... A 1980 law ensures that diluted bitumen is not classified as oil, and companies transporting it in pipelines do not have to pay into the federal Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund. "
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Steve makes an eminent domain funny

Actual Harper quote : "I remain optimistic that the project will eventually go ahead because it makes eminent sense."

I'm surprised that TransCanada's forays into eminent domain -  a corporations' state-sanctioned right to expropriate private property for the public good - and you're not fooling us with that jobs, jobs, jobs crap, btw - has not made more of a splash with the property rights crowd up here. It certainly was the key to opposition to the pipeline south of the border.

NYTimes, one month ago :

A Canadian company (sic) has been threatening to confiscate private land from South Dakota to the Gulf of Mexico, and is already suing many who have refused to allow the Keystone XL pipeline on their property even though the controversial project has yet to receive federal approval.

 While it is impossible to say how many cases are working their way through the legal system, in addition to the 56 Texas and South Dakota cases, TransCanada acknowledges it has sent “Dear Owner” letters to dozens of families in Nebraska.

Here is one such letter, sent back in April to Nebraska landowner Randy Thompson from the TransCanada office in Houston, Texas. 

Nebraska : Eminent domain pressure targeted

A Nebraska lawmaker [State Sen. Bill Avery] is proposing criminal penalties for pipeline officials who pressure landowners with eminent domain before a pipeline gets the official green light.

Eminent domain refers to the power of governments to take private property for a public use with appropriate compensation. The power is granted to some private companies, such as utilities and railroads.
Current state law sets no limits on pipeline companies' use of eminent domain, said Norfolk attorney David Domina. That allowed TransCanada to send out two rounds of letters pressuring landowners to sign easements allowing the controversial Keystone XL pipeline across their land.
The letters said that if landowners did not sign within 30 days, the company would use eminent domain to get the right to cross their land.

On Monday, after being hit with a 2 year delay from the US State Dept, TransCanada announced it has reached an agreement with the Nebraska government to change the route of its proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline by 50 km in order to avoid the ecologically sensitive Sandhills region and the most vulnerable part of the Ogallala aquifer, taking one whole day to walk back from its previous claim that any change to the route would be an automatic deal-killer. 

Presumably the TransCanada Houston office has now recommenced cranking out eminent domain letters.

You don't hear much about the use of Canada's Expropriation Act. Last time I wrote about it was when the government of Saskatchewan expropriated a farmer's land last year for Loblaws.

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Keystone XL vs owning the tarsands

Former U.S. ambassador to Canada David Wilkins calls it "catastrophic", FinMin Flaherty said "the delay may kill the project" so Canada will look into sending our oil to China via BC instead, and TransCanada Corp is "deeply disappointed". So goes the official reaction to the US State Dept decision to delay Keystone XL for further examination.

But the vast majority of comments from the public under these news stories boil down to this :
Why doesn't Canada do its own tarsands refining?
Why isn't Canada building its own refineries and keeping the jobs here rather than just shipping the raw material abroad?

The response from purported industry insiders under these comments runs as follows :

that no investors are willing to undertake building tarsands refineries because it would be very very expensive; not enough profit margin; that there would be considerable Canadian nimby, environmental, and FN opposition to building them leading to a protracted approval process of uncertain outcome; that Canada does not have the expertise to build them; that Canadian labour costs are too high.

I guess it's too obvious to include that multicorps and foreign companies operating in the tarsands likely want to optimize corporate control and profits by owning both ends of the supply line. 

Or that we're importing 1,088,000 barrels of oil per day against the 1,929,000 that we're exporting because even though TransCanada CEO Russ Girling says : 

 “We can route a pipeline through the Andes, over the Rocky Mountains, through the Everglades, through the Sand Hills”

 apparently we can't route one to eastern Canada.


Foreign ownership :

StatsCan : Total assets, operating revenues and operating profits under foreign control

Oil and gas extraction and support activities - 2009 

• Assets - 35.9% under foreign control
• Operating revenues - 51.1% under foreign control 
• Operating profits : 41.3% under foreign control

"American-controlled enterprises continued to dominate the shares of assets, revenues and profits under foreign-control. These enterprises increased their share of both revenues and profits to 59.1% and 58.3% respectively." 

"In the oil and gas extraction industry, foreign-controlled enterprises increased their share of revenues to 51.1%. This occurred as revenues declined nearly twice as fast in 2009 for domestic enterprises as they did for foreign enterprises."

Looking through the producing members of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, I notice nearly 20% of them list their head offices outside Canada, mostly in Texas. 20% doesn't sound like much but many of them are the bigs, including Koch, ExxonMobil, Shell. 

Meanwhile China's investment in the tarsands is up to what - $13-billion now? 

 
Leo De Bever is head of Alberta’s $70-billion pool of public sector funds, including pension funds, endowments, and the $15-billion Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund.

"My simple point is that you lose ownership, you lose control. Those who control the resource always have the incentive to dig it up as soon as possible,” Mr. De Bever said. 

Mr. De Bever said it would make more sense for Canada to accelerate the development of technologies to produce the oil sands, improving environmental impacts and efficiency, rather than accelerate extraction.
“That is where that tradeoff of digging up now versus digging up later comes in,” he said. “If you know that in a few years you can make it drastically more efficient, it makes the resource more valuable.”

“If you want a strong Canadian economy, to some degree large Canadian institutions have got to take it upon themselves to be not just passive investors,” said Mr. De Bever. “Doing the right thing is not part of my mandate. Doing the profitable thing is. But if  I can do the right thing and the profitable thing, I would do so.”

Sounds like a "no-brainer", doesn't it, Steve?

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TransCanada : an "American company"

Hey, did you think TransCanada, the company intending to extend the Keystone XL pipeline from Hardisty, Alberta to the Free Tariff  Zone refineries in Texas, was a Canadian company? 
Me too. Must be something about the name. And the fact that articles about TransCanada always refer to it as "Alberta-based".

However TransCanada's own K-XL Know the Facts webpage begs to differ. Debunking the "Myth" that  TransCanada is a foreign company operating in the US :

"Like many American companies with operations in Canada, we are incorporated and registered in both Canada and the United States. We currently have 1,631 talented employees in 33 U.S. states. Our U.S. operations are headquartered in Houston and will be responsible for the U.S. construction of Keystone XL."

Huh. 

Now as we already know via Inside Climate News, Koch exports 25% of all tarsands crude to the US.

In 2009, Flint Hills Resources Canada LP, an Alberta-based subsidiary of Koch Industries, applied for—and won—"intervenor status" in the National Energy Board hearings that led to Canada's 2010 approval of its 327-mile portion of the pipeline. 

The company's Flint Hills subsidiary already has an oil terminal in Hardisty, Alberta, the starting point of the Keystone XL. It sends about 250,000 barrels of diluted bitumen a day to a heavy oil refinery it owns near St. Paul, Minn., making that refinery "among the top processors of Canadian crude in the United States," the company website says.

Yesterday that same National Energy Board, Canada's presumed energy regulator, rejected the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union's request to hold a new hearing into K-XL. 
CEP, which opposes K-XL on the reasonable grounds it would rather see tarsands refineries built in Canada, maintained "the project had violated its permit by not starting construction by a March 2011 deadline". However, according to the NEB, TransCanada's 'earth moving' activities in Canada apparently counts as a start. 

Meanwhile, south of the border, three environmental groups filed a lawsuit against TransCanada earlier this month for mowing a 110 ft wide swath clear across the state of Nebraska prior to receiving the official US go ahead for K-XL to begin. TransCanada responded that mowing grasslands and moving endangered beetles out of the way of the proposed pipeline doesn't count as a start.

So far, no matter which side of the border you're on, things really do go better for Koch. 
And for TransCanada, an "American company".

Update : From Harvard Business School : a short history of TransCanada Pipelines

TransCanada's "Know the Facts" webpage - June 2012 http://web.archive.org/web/20121109020149/http://www.transcanada.com/docs/Key_Projects/know_the_facts_kxl.pdf

 
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The US State Dept. TransCanada Keystone XL Pipeline

The US State Dept. has outsourced much of its responsibility for determining whether to give approval to the TransCanada Keystone XL pipeline to TransCanada consultant Cardno-ENTRIX, including  :

1) the State Dept.'s TransCanada KeystoneXL webpage - see the tiny print at the bottom ,

2) two Environmental Impact Statements(EIS) and Presidential Permits for international border crossing  (Great commentary and an explanation on how EIS work from Scarecrow at FireDogLake), and

3) the public hearings held in the states along the length of the proposed pipeline - Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas - with a final one in Washington DC on October 9.

Should you wish to send your opinion of the pipeline proposal directly to the US State Dept, Cardno-ENTRIX handles that too.

The US State Dept has inserted a corporation between itself and the people it was elected to serve.

Excellent article and new information on this extraordinary conflict of interest from Brad Johnson at Think Progress yesterday, with thanks to his link to a Creekside post back in July , where we noted :

 Cardno-ENTRIX explains on their website :

Keystone XL Oil Pipeline Project EIS

Client : TransCanada Keystone Pipeline, L.P. (Keystone)
"TransCanada Keystone Pipeline, L.P. (Keystone) has applied to the U.S. Department of State (DOS) for a Presidential Permit ....
Keystone contracted with Cardno ENTRIX as the third-party contractor to assist DOS in preparing the EIS and to conduct the Section 106 consultation process."

and again in a Cardno Mergers Presentation :

Keystone and Keystone XL Pipelines

Client : US Department of State and TransCanada

ENTRIX is the prime contractor for the preparation of two third party EIS’s for the US Department of State and TransCanada Keystone Crude Oil Pipeline System.The project features 1,702 miles of new 36-inch diameter pipeline (327 miles in Canada and 1,375 miles in U.S.) with capacity for 900,000 barrels per day.

So how did those Cardno-ENTRIX public pipeline hearings go?

People arriving 45 minutes early to the Port Arthur, Texas hearing found "hundreds" of people already there in t-shirts which read BUILD KEYSTONE XL NOW! GOOD JOBS! U.S. SECURITY!

"Once we were allowed to sign up to speak (at a table staffed by Cardno Entrix, according to their name tags) we entered the room to find the first 8-10 rows, (left side:suits, right side: oil field workers), filled by these individuals and their slogans."

By the time people in opposition got their turn, it was getting late and their time to speak was cut back.
But at least they didn't get arrested for it.

Austin, Texas :

"According to Karen Hadden, the Executive Director of the Sustainable and Economic Development (SEED) Coalition, “This was not a hearing, this was a farce.” Ms. Hadden arrived and had been waiting for a couple of hours to give comments when they cut the hearing off. Later, when she was attempting to find out what her options were for providing comments to the State Department given she was unable to do so at the hearing, she was told she must leave the premises or she would be arrested."

Ms Hadden provides a photo of someone else being arrested for 'expressing concerns about the flawed process'.
The public hearings along the pipeline route are now over.

There's been no media interest so far up here in Canada that TransCanada and the US State Dept have apparently shared the use of a "professional environmental consulting company" in the almost certain future approval of the KeystoneXL pipeline.

Must be part of that "Shaping the Future" thing.
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State Dept. hires TransCanada consultant to approve Keystone pipeline

Signs point to US approval of oilsands pipeline - Chicago Tribune

"The US State Department has completed two environmental impact statements on the [Keystone] pipeline with the help of Cardno Entrix, an environmental consulting firm that has said its biggest clients include TransCanada Corp., the owner of the Keystone pipeline system."


I hadn't heard this before so I checked out the Cardno Entrix website. See above graphic.

On June 1, 2010, Cardno, "an integrated professional services provider" acquired two US environmental consultancy firms, ENTRIX and ERI .

From Cardno’s ENTRIX and ERI Acquisition Strategy on "complementary markets":

•Acquiring ENTRIX and ERI will increase Cardno’s revenue from environmental consulting businesses –a growth industry.

•Cardno’s strategy is also to increase its proportion of revenue from resources and energy business including oil and gas, mining and industrial sectors.

Current Key Projects.
Keystone and Keystone XL Pipelines
Client: US Department of State and TransCanada

ENTRIX is the prime contractor for the preparation of two third party EIS’s for the US Department of State and TransCanada Keystone Crude Oil Pipeline System. The project features 1,702 miles of new 36-inch diameter pipeline (327miles in Canada and 1,375 miles in U.S.) with capacity for 900,000 barrels per day.

ENTRIX is preparing two Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) and Presidential Permits for international border crossing under the direction of Department of State and Department of Energy.

Well that's handy. And we already know much of the Koch-sponsored US House Energy and Commerce Committee is on board.

Funny thing - TransCanada is also a sponsor of our own government's quest for a national tarsands energy strategy.
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