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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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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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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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.

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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.