The Sixth Estate

It has been officially announced that the Tory-run farce of a climate change institute, the Canada School of Energy and Environment, has officially replaced the disgraced Tory insider and convicted fraudster Bruce Carson with someone even closer to the energy industry, Rick Hyndman. Around the same time, Carson’s chair at the head of another related government think tank, Carbon Management Canada, was filled by a Suncor executive named Gordon Lambert. It appears that those in charge of the institutes are taking advantage of our distraction with the election campaign to complete the oil industry’s takeover of the government clean energy program.

The Edmonton Journal, which reported the new announcement (CSEE’s website doesn’t show it yet), mentions only that Hyndman is a former deputy minister at Alberta Energy. That’s probably true. However, he just came off of 12 years as a policy analyst for the oil industry lobby group, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP). That’s six times as long, and a decade more recently, than his stint as a deputy minister. And his time at Alberta Energy, according to his bio, was focused on deregulation. So it’s definitely worth asking how exactly the University of Calgary decided that this guy was qualified to lead a school supposedly doing scientific research into clean energy, which Carson explicitly turned into a school doing government-industry policy coordination.

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In The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan wrote that around half of scientists in the world at some point find themselves at least partially dependent on the military to fund their research — and that this is a problem. Today, that’s still true. But another serious problem is the privatization of “public” scientific research. Under the Harper Government™ this has proceeded on three fronts, one of which has occupied most of this blog’s attention recently.

At major research institutions around the country, a profound change is taking place. Programs are being taken over by corporatists — not just administrators with an inadequate knowledge of the gritty details. Objectives are being quietly altered to reflect commercial priorities rather than basic scientific ones, which often can’t guarantee short-term industrial applications. Some important research programs that have so far thrived in the public sector are simply being handed over to the private sector on the dubious grounds that they will somehow run them more effectively. In at least one case I’ll discuss, these have an enormous added cost which won’t appear anywhere in the contracts.

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As I reported recently, the Canada School of Energy and Environment is in the process of erasing its disgraced former director, Conservative fraudster Bruce Carson. This is clearly an attempt at rebranding the school, and it is a failed one. Judging by their staff page, The two most important people at the school now appear to be yet another Harper Government™ aide, Zoe Addington, and Saskatchewan energy business promoter Dale Botting.

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Updated below break: Carson being erased entirely from CSEE website.

Yesterday, the Liberal Party and then the media finally caught up to Sixth Estate by going to the website of the Tory Canada School of Energy and Environment, the late home of convicted fraudster and former Harper Government™ chief of staff Bruce Carson, and downloading his abominably partisan speech to the Manning Centre for Building Democracy in 2010, in which Carson, supposedly a clean energy research promoter but still obviously no more than a partisan hack, outlined how to “manage a Conservative agenda in a minority situation.” In response, as you can see here, the School is attempting to pretend the speech never happened by erasing it from its website.

For the moment the erasure is only partial. However, I suspected something like this might happen and so I downloaded a copy of the presentation ages ago, as a backup. I would hate to see Carson’s contributions to Canadian democracy simply vanish overnight.

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In the fourth installment of my Disappearing Bruce Carson series, I want to point out a website that hasn’t disappeared, but has made Carson disappear. It’s the University of Calgary School of Public Policy, an institution where Bruce Carson was, until recently, a visiting fellow and adjunct professor. Along with right-wing propagandists Jack Mintz (now an “academic”) and Tom Flanagan, and conservative but genuine academic David Bercuson, Carson was expected to be one of the school’s core instructors. Now he’s gone without a trace from this page:

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When H2o Water Pros and convicted Conservative fraudster Bruce Carson decided to try hawking their gimmicky Simple H2o water filtration units to the Department of Indian Affairs, they created a front company to handle the transactions, H2O Global Group. When APTN broke the story, H2o Pros‘s website vanished. Oddly, H2o Global’s website didn’t, and can still be found here. That’s particularly odd given that while it’s website is still up, it’s surprisingly difficult to find the company itself.

H2o Global’s website says it is based in Suite 1150 at the World Exchange Plaza, an office building in downtown Ottawa, just a couple of blocks away from Bruce’s old digs in Langevin Block, which houses the Harper Government™ Prime Minister’s Office. That same office suite is also currently claimed by (among other tenants) GCI Canada, home of Harper’s former senior strategist Ken Boessenkool. And by SecDev, the Canadian partner of Palantir, recently and dramatically outed by Anonymous as part of a conspiracy by the American Chamber of Commerce to stalk and hack political opponents. You can rent it too, if you have a couple hundred bucks a month. If you actually need to use the office, say for a meeting, you have to pay extra, generally by the hour.

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Here’s a hint for organizations that don’t want to look like dubious fly-by-night operations: the moment one of your philandering associates gets called on the carpet for his dubious activities, don’t shut down your website. This advice comes too late for Bruce Carson’s company, H2O Water Pros, the ones that he was going to illegally lobby for in the halls of Indian Affairs. Their main website, H2Owaterpros.com, went offline when this affair started and hasn’t come back up yet.

Interestingly, H2O Pros’s subsidiary H2O Global Group, created to handle the reserve water filtration contracts that it thought Carson was going to land, is still up and running. They look like a separate company, complete with a downtown office at O’Connor and Metcalfe, just a couple of blocks from the Prime Minister’s Office and a long ways away from the company’s shabbier digs out in Gloucester. According to a brochure for this group, which I’ve saved for posterity, this is the company for which Michele and her mother Christine worked. Michele’s name can no longer be found on the public website.

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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.

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I wrote about Harper Government™ aide turned energy industry astroturfer Bruce Carson a while ago. Since then, things have happened quickly. Carson was caught meeting with energy industry executives to downplay climate change concerns, and then meeting with Indian Affairs aides to illegally lobby them on reserve water filtration contracts. In response, he has been referred to the RCMP for investigation, and has also been forced to take a leave of absence from the leadership of the Canada School of Energy and Environment. This is welcome news, but we shouldn’t stop yet, especially since Carson is now distorting the truth yet again.

Before I get too far, let me point out that Carson’s work is already starting to disappear down the Internet memory hole. Until recently he was an adjunct professor at Jack Mintz’s right-wing School of Public Policy, which, in a rare feat of academic entrepreneurship, is currently selling its research agenda to the highest bidder donor. That school has already quietly removed Carson from its website. The Energy Policy Institute, an industry lobby group which was led by Carson and turncoat politician David Emerson, has gone offline completely as I write this, although that may be only a temporary glitch.

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