Fifth Sixth Estate Weekly Flack Awards
The Sixth Estate Weekly Flack Awards are a regular series dedicated to recognizing the silliest and the worst in the generally pathetic field of government communications. These awards recognize absurd errors, bizarre subjects, unnecessary excitement over trivial programs, and preposterous quote-mining.
This week there were strong entrants in all categories. For instance, in the unnecessary excitement category, there was Pierre Poilievre and Rona Ambrose announcing to what they dreamed was an interested national audience that they would be attending the official renaming of one of the government’s many buildings in Ottawa. However, this week there could be only one winner: Minister Joe Oliver’s bizarre, paranoid “open letter” addressed, oddly, to nobody, in which he vents his spleen over the growing list of people who want to comment at the pipeline hearings.
Their goal is to stop any major project no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth. No forestry. No mining. No oil. No gas. No more hydro-electric dams.
These groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda. They seek to exploit any loophole they can find, stacking public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill good projects. They use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest. They attract jet-setting celebrities with some of the largest personal carbon footprints in the world to lecture Canadians not to develop our natural resources. Finally, if all other avenues have failed, they will take a quintessential American approach: sue everyone and anyone to delay the project even further. They do this because they know it can work. It works because it helps them to achieve their ultimate objective: delay a project to the point it becomes economically unviable.
There is, says the Learned Minister, a grand conspiracy of foreigners and liberals dedicated to stopping the pipeline. There is, of course, such a conspiracy — though not a secret one. In his absurd move to shut down pipeline hearings on the grounds that mere open discussion is a threat to Canadian democracy, Oliver managed to do what many would have said was impossible: make himself look worse than the hippies the news loves to point and laugh at.
Although the Flack Awards are a humorous series, please don’t miss the serious undertones here. When the government of Canada says that public hearings are dangerous to Canadian “interests,” it’s time to re-evaluate our interests… or re-evaluate our government.
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Sam Gunsch
Alberta’s new Premier Redford shares the Harper/Oliver concerns: she is ‘disappointed’ that so many citizens are allowed to participate(below). She would have preferred the narrow definitions used to limit participation in AB regulatory hearings. Tarsands projects, upgraders, etc… no need to fear much dissent from AB citizens. Spies used on citizens once.
Our new Premier Alison Redford
…implying AB’s definition of directly affected should have been applied:
““I have been disappointed with the approach that the panel has taken with respect to how they define people that can be adversely affected by the decisions,” Redford said in an interview Tuesday.
“They’ve taken a very wide interpretation of that definition and I think it’s allowed for the sort of hearing agenda that we’re seeing, which is a year-and-a-half of meetings with 4,100 people and 10-minute submissions. Do we get a good result from that? I don’t know.”
Read more: http://www.calgaryherald.com/business/Redford+disappointed+with+setup+Gateway+pipeline+hearing/5976384/story.html#ixzz1jH5F94GA”
The type of politics-as-war that has been grown here by corporate elites in joint-venture with the Tories is destructive to democracy. Sorry to share this, but on election night, a political observer here told me, ‘Canadians are now going to find out what it’s been like to live in Alberta.’ I would add that it wasn’t like this much under Lougheed…but has been for the last 25 or so years.
Sam Gunsch
Sixth Estate
They don’t appear to be “concerned,” for instance, that the Koch brothers fund the Fraser Institute. Evil foreign funding plots existed only in the minds of Vivian Krause until a couple of weeks ago. It’s stunning to see how quickly a meme can catch on when it is seen as politically useful.
I will be shortly publishing a piece on lobbying and the prevalence of foreign-funded lobbyists in Ottawa, another instance of “foreign political influence” where the government does not appear to be particularly agitated.
On the other hand, though, as you point out — concerned about the delays intrinsic in the democratic process? Yes, I think those concern them a great deal.
Holly Stick
There’s been a lot of blogging the past couple of days about “Ethical Oil” and its Conservative connections. The most important blogs are Deep Climate with 3 posts about the Ethical Oil Institute, including this most recent one:
http://deepclimate.org/2012/01/13/ethical-oil-political-connections-part-1-conservatives-go-newclear/
And Desmogblog:
http://www.desmogblog.com/cozy-ties-astroturf-ethical-oil-and-conservative-alliance-promote-tar-sands-expansion
Sixth Estate
Yes. Although it’s recently attracted new attention, it’s old news and quite obvious, given the presence of Velshi and Marshall. I’ve been intrigued to note recent comments on the website connections, however.
Holly Stick
Yes. And today there are comments about some fake facebook pages showing various Northern BC towns in favour of the pipeline, which appeared last October, apparently.
The Sixth Estate » Ottawa Besieged by Foreign Money, Billionaire Non-Socialists
[...] a Canadian pipeline as part of an international anti-Canadian conspiracy (don’t ask me, ask Minister Joe Oliver). It’s even more interesting to see their studious unconcern about a more routine way in [...]