The Sixth Estate

After the media picked up on Bruce Carson’s shenanigans, I quickly downloaded his speeches from the website of the Canada School of Energy and Environment, suspecting that important websites might soon go down the memory hole. I was right in principle, but wrong about the websites. The CSEE site is still unchanged, absent a brief message noting that Carson has taken a leave of absence. But two other relevant sites have vanished — those of H2O Water Pros (the company Carson lobbied for) and the Energy Policy Institute of Canada (the new industry climate change group that he co-chaired).

It’s possible that the sites simply went under thanks to the unexpected deluge of public interest in what were, until this past week, fringe institutions without a substantial public profile. The fact that H2O Water Pros has disappeared but its Indian Affairs project partner company, H2O Global Group, is still online speaks to that. Still, I have to wonder. If it was a mere service problem, they should have fixed it, but the sites have now been down for days. I hope they come back up. In the meantime I have the important details here.

There are several websites under edit, so there are several sites in need of my preservation effort. Let’s begin with the one for the Energy Policy Institute of Canada. Alongside Bruce’s gig at the Canada School of Energy, this was to be his major contribution to the clean energy movement. He, and it, also had contacts with the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, which has been controlled for the last several years by another elite Conservative insider, David McLaughlin (anyone want to check if he’s been lobbying, too?). “EPIC” now appears to be an epic failure, seeing as how it doesn’t even have a website, but its plan was to produce a framework for a genuine national energy policy. A NEP, if you will. Remember the last one?

This one, though, will be written by EPIC, which unabashedly described itself as a “business organization.” It was funded by a range of business-oriented nonprofits and trade associations, like the Canada West Foundation, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (John Manley now in command), the Canadian Nuclear Association, the Canadian Electrical Association, and the Canadian Wind Energy Association. Its list of members was exclusively corporate, ranging from Accenture and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers to Imperial Oil, TransAlta, and TransCanada Pipelines.

Supposedly, the Board of Directors would include representatives from consumers and companies, equally balanced, but the actual executive disclosed online includes only corporate reps. The chair is David Emerson, the traitorous former MP from Vancouver who used to lead Canfor and now works for Chinese investors. Bruce Carson was the vice-chair. Also listed were Elyse Allan, CEO of GE Canada; Gerard Protti, executive adviser of Encana; energy lawyer Doug Black; and Daniel Gagnier, a former Alcan executive who was a top civil servant during the Mulroney years and now chairs the International Institute for Sustainable Development while simultaneously working as an “adviser” at the Hill & Knowlton lobbying and marketing firm.

Presumably this will be a setback to EPIC. The question is, why did they go down just after Carson was exposed? Are we going to see a new group formed in a little while, complete with new, cleaner leaders?

• “Canada as a Major Resource Holder” (Shell Canada)
• “A Strategy for Canada’s Global Energy Leadership”
• EPIC: Contributors
• EPIC: Goals
• EPIC: Governance
• EPIC: Leadership
• EPIC: Members
• EPIC: Guiding Principles
• EPIC: What We Do
• EPIC: Who We Are

If EPIC comes back online, I would be happy to remove this archive of their site as a courtesy. Until then, this is a valuable archive of what might be a deceased organization.

Update: EPIC is back online. Bruce Carson’s name has vanished from the leadership page. The Strategy for Canada’s Global Leadership can be freely downloaded again, but I don’t see a link to the Shell presentation, which I have linked to above.