The Sixth Estate

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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It’s a slow day news-wise, so I want to take a moment and return to a topic I’ve discussed recently: lobbyists. In my opinion, lobbyists are worse than think tanks. Think tanks are generally home to some true believers, however much I disagree with them, and however much they are seen as useful idiots by tobacco companies (a la the Fraser Institute) or take cash from the trash lobby to promote privatization in Toronto (a la the C.D. Howe Institute). Lobbyists, in contrast, by definition have no worthwhile values of their own. They are the most untrustworthy people on the political landscape, because they trade in the one commodity that should not never be for sale in a democracy: access. Fortunately lobbyists have one vulnerability: they must register, which I recently used to great effect in criticizing Cassels Brock lawyer Larry Herman.

Lobbying firms may specialize in public relations, political relations, or bureaucratic relations (or some combination of the three). In this post, I want to look at a firm that does the second. By the way, there is no greater proof that political party lines are a rhetorical sham than the fact that quality lobbying outfits always have some high-powered Liberal and Conservative advisers on their staff simultaneously, prepared to work with either party on behalf of their wealthy clients. That’s what Earnscliffe Strategy Group does, for instance. Or, as they put it, they improve clients’ “profile and success with decision-makers” through “outreach to key officials and political leaders, caucus and parliamentary strategies, communications vehicles, and public opinion research.”

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