Night Music: Beast of Burden

An Evening Out With The Right People

Last night I attended a presentation by Vivian Krause, the pro-oil Harper Tory who claims the environmental movement (and much else) in Canada has been hijacked by American economic interests. She drew a decent crowd to Federico’s Supper Club on Commercial which was just about the right size for the gathering; a crowd dominated by supporters of the interchangeable BC Liberals and Federal Tories, plus a good number of anti-Vision Vancouver folks, most of whom, I would guess, support the NPA locally.

Knowing her audience, she began with a section on the foreign funding for Vision Vancouver and Gregor Robertson in particular.  However, nothing she talked about was new. Even a know-nothing like me has been writing about that Billionaire Boy’s Club for many years. Perhaps she gave a bit more detail, but nothing that could not have been inferred from what we already knew.  I have been actively seeking the demise of Vision for years and years (as a hundred or more entries in this blog will attest) but she added nothing to the argument. And, frankly, the foreign funding of Vision is the least part of their callous unpleasantness.

She then parlayed  the Tides Foundation funding of Robertson into a much wider conspiracy in which American oil interests, working through a network of supposedly “progressive” foundations (Hewlett, Rockefeller, Gates etc) , has provided “$600 million” to a large number of “Canadian” environment groups. The entire purpose of this campaign, apparently, is to make sure Alberta oil stays in North America and does not achieve a world price on the open market. She claims the environmental movement are dupes to this evil cabal and she proclaims herself shocked (and apparently horrified) that the ecological movement is highly professional and well-funded, with PR companies and copy writers and not just hippy protesters.

Finally, she expanded her thesis to encompass an entire tin-hat empire of anti-Canada conspiracy:  including the creation of huge areas of land where any form of industrialisation or farming or extraction would be completely banned. a personal attack on the editor of “Science” magazine, and an imputation that the Canada Revenue Agency is either in cahoots with this cabal or somehow otherwise too distracted to lay charges against improper charities.

This was a very one-sided presentation (or “fair and balanced” in Fox News terms) and I don’t blame her for that; it was received with great applause. It was no surprise therefore that she didn’t mention the foreign donations to the BC Liberals (in what is now just about the only jurisdiction in the world that allows political donations from outside the country) or the massive infusions of pro-oil cash from the Kansas Koch brothers who subsidise the Fraser Institute and other right-wing groups, and who now own a majority of Alberta tar sands and thus would be the major beneficiaries if Alberta could achieve higher prices — more profits for them and more price increases for us.

While I don’t really care to give someone with her views any tips, it has to be said that her presentation was a bit of a mess. It was too long, by far, and full of impenetrable spreadsheets and indistinct images of “donation cover letters” and similar material.  She began her lecture by immediately showing this kind of document without any context. She would have done much better to slow down and spend two minutes up front (and between each of the segments of her story) giving an executive summary which would have helped the audience make more sense of the documents that were to follow. And then to limit the documents she showed to those that were most relevant to her case. As it stands, it was all a bit of a mish-mash.

But I am glad I went because, as they say, you need to keep your friends close and your enemies closer.