The Sixth Estate

Canada School of Energy and Environment director Bruce Carson‘s life has gone straight downhill since I first posted about him a couple of weeks ago, pointing out that he seemed more interested in defending Conservative energy policy than actually promoting scientific research on climate change issues. Since then we’ve also discovered that he was stripped of his legal license for fraud, met with industry insiders to downplay the tarsands, allegedly lobbied the Minister of Indian Affairs on behalf of a water filtration company (H20 Pros), and then, according to his own account, lied to his employers at the company about doing the lobbying when he actually wasn’t. Thanks to the fantastic work of APTN, even seedier details have now emerged.

Carson has a fiancée, Michele McPherson, who is also a prostitute, or was, going by the name of Leanna VIP. They have a large house outside Ottawa, a black Mercedes car that she drives — and a very handsome contract with H20 Pros, the company Carson is accused of illegally lobbying for. McPherson signed, and Carson witnessed, a contract which gave her 20% of the revenue of that company on the First Nation reserve contracts which her boyfriend was helping arrange.

(more…)

When I wrote about Bruce Carson (twice recently, now), I had no idea I had stumbled across more than a Conservative Harper Government™ insider who’d been given a science job without the appropriate background, and who was working a little too hand-in-glove with energy industry types for my taste. It seems I was wrong. Carson is in the news again as a result of an APTN investigation that reveals Carson lobbied illegally for the H20 Pros water company shortly after leaving the Prime Minister’s Office.

APTN now possess emails in which Carson discusses the details of his plans to break the law by approaching the Indian Affairs minister to discuss contracts H20 Pros hoped to land for water filtration systems on First Nations reserves. There are two offences there, actually: you can’t be an unregistered lobbyist, and you definitely can’t be an unregistered lobbyist within five years of leaving a political job. Carson compounds his sins by advancing the unbelievable defence that he is not guilty because “he lied in the email.” Either he lied to his employer, or he’s lying to the public.

Being an illegal operative is actually familiar territory for Carson. APTN also dredged up another fact which Carson’s official biography conveniently forgot to include: the reason he went into politics is because he was convicted of defrauding his clients in 1982 and stripped of the right to practice law.

A week ago, I suggested that there was something very odd indeed about plucking a Conservative insider without a science background from the senior echelon of the Prime Minister’s Office and putting him in charge of Canada School of Energy and Environment, supposedly created to finance our revolutionary transition to a green, carbon-friendly economy. Today, Postmedia papers reported that I was right. Since at least a year ago tomorrow, Carson was meeting with members of the oil lobby, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, to scheme ways to defend the tarsands and co-opt “less strident” environmentalists.

Carson is a lawyer who worked for Harper when the latter was opposition leader and then prime minister, before moving to Alberta to head up the CSEE. Despite the fact that he is theoretically now an academic (the centre is jointly housed at the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, and University of Lethbridge), he still sees his first duty as a Conservative loyalist. Significantly, the same month that Carson was meeting with industry officials to plot on the climate change agenda, he gave a speech to the right-wing Manning Centre on the topic of “Managing a Conservative Political Agenda in a Minority Situation.” His speaking notes contain no references to climate policy whatsoever. They do note the importance of supposed Conservative values, like “unprecedented… faith in leader.”

The CSEE web page contains (as “resources”) a selection of other fatuous speeches, too.

Update: More on Carson and his scammy Indian Affairs dealings here.

The poisonous combination of economic woes, the juvenile governance of the newly renamed “Harper Government”™, and the complete abrogation of meaningful responsibilities by Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition has done real damage to Canada. One of the places where this is most obvious is a subject which almost nobody in Canadian politics seems to be seriously talking about anymore: climate change. Remember climate change? A few years ago the country was so upset at Harper’s attempted turfing of the issue that he was forced to make some symbolic half-measures of restitution. Now, nada. Never a real leader on the issue, Canada has slipped far behind Europe. Oh, our government knows climate change is happening. They wouldn’t be spending billions of dollars buying military toys for the Arctic if they didn’t. They just don’t want to interfere with their friends in the oil industry’s last few years of record profits. I believe that future generations will regard our calamitous failure to act against a disaster we knew was coming as the greatest failure of leadership in the 20th and 21st centuries, and possibly ever.

Oh, the Harper Government is still taking half-measures. They’re still preparing for a new debate on climate change, if one emerges. For example, they’ve created the Canada School of Energy and Environment, which is dedicated to funding research on climate change, clean energy, and what is ambiguously referred to as “technology commercialization.” And if you’re a small-government conservative who believes the first duty of government is to do nothing about climate change, who do you put in charge of your new Centre for Excellence in climate change research? A scientist? An engineer, maybe? Nope:

(more…)