Vivian Krause;

Over the past five years, I have gone though more than 100,000 pages of U.S. tax returns and traced more than 2,000 grants from U.S. foundations to environmental and First Nations groups in Canada. Most of my research is based on U.S. tax returns because the Internal Revenue Service requires greater disclosure than the Canadian Revenue Agency.
While the volunteer activists on the front lines of the Tar Sands Campaign are every bit as Canadian as I am, their big funders are not. According to U.S. tax returns and other documents, the Tar Sands Campaign is co-funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Oak Foundation, the Tides Foundation, the Sea Change Foundation, the Marisla Foundation and at least a dozen other foundations – most of which are based in California. These are the big green elephants that have fueled efforts to thwart the development of Canadian oil and gas for more than a decade.
By my analysis, more than a dozen U.S. foundations have granted at least US$75 million between 2009 and 2013 for initiatives that stymie the Canadian energy sector. This does not include grants for general or unspecified purposes nor for large-scale conservation initiatives that aim to put huge blocks of land off-limits to natural resource development.
So, what’s the motivation of the funders? One of the few documents that provide insights into the funding of the climate movement is a strategy paper, Design to Win: Philanthropy’s Role in the Fight Against Global Warming. According to Design to Win, the overarching goal of voter and consumer education campaigns is to create a policy context for a massive shift in investment capital and a billion-dollar market for renewable energy. Without a negative foil of bad press about fossil fuels, it would be much harder to justify the billions of dollars that government has invested in solar and wind.

An interview with Ezra Levant;

AO: What is the book’s overarching message?
EL: I’ll never know as much about the oil and gas industry as an actual petroleum engineer, but I have ways of looking at things that people who are right in the thick of it might lack. I remind people this is not just about Republicans versus Democrats, Liberals versus Conservatives. It’s not a British Columbia or New Brunswick problem. The fracking story is a global thing. And the real beneficiaries of any anti-fracking policy are not some local activists, but Vladimir Putin, and Qatar and Iran.

More proof Tom Steyer is a hypocritical snakeoil merchant: Coal profits fund his anti #kxl activism #cdnpoli #ableg http://t.co/rlr2grWXzG

— Kevin Libin (@kevinlibin) July 5, 2014

Canadian Press;

The Law Society of Alberta has disbarred a lawyer accused of misconduct in his handling of settlements awarded to survivors of residential school abuse. […]
The panel heard that between 2006 and 2012, Blott’s Calgary law firm handled almost 4,600 residential school claims, many in southern Alberta. Information was taken from each victim who would sign a retainer agreement. If the settlement were $100,000, Blott would receive $15,000 from the federal government and up to an additional $15,000 from the settlement payout.
“The tragic reality … is what started out as a reconciliation effort in the righting of wrongs turned into what can only be described as a factory of gross self-interest, where victims of the residential school system were essentially revictimized and treated less like human beings and more like cattle,” said Harvie.
“They were in fact dehumanized by a process where the ultimate goal appears to be making as much money as possible with the least amount of personal attention.”

h/t Patrick

Late last year, the federal review panel that approved the Northern Gateway project listed 209 conditions that had to be met. That panel began hearing public comments way back in mid-2010. Which is to say: This one panel was in operation for longer than it took for the actual Trans Mountain Pipeline to be scouted, conceived, planned, built and activated. Sixty years ago, we laid pipe. Now we lay paper.

We need a famine.