“From the very beginning the campaign strategy was to land-lock the tar sands so the crude could not reach the international market where it could fetch a high price per barrel. This meant national and grassroots organizing to block all proposed pipelines.”
– The Tar Sands Campaign website
Last month, Vivian Krause was on a speaking tour in Calgary, Edmonton and Fort McMurray, lambasting Tides International as well as the Rockefeller, the Hewlett, and Packard Foundations and other U.S. trust funds, all of which are pledged to embarrass Canada, weaken the Alberta government and shut down the Canadian energy industry. These groups are all part of the Tar Sands Campaign, under the leadership of Corporate Ethics International, an American environmental lobby.
Krause tells us that: “Among the strategies employed by the Tar Sands Campaign are legal action, putting land and marine access off-limits in the name of protecting wildlife habitat, fomenting First Nations opposition and leveraging their constitutional rights, lobbying and celebrity endorsement.”
If you ever wondered why Jane Fonda flew a fuel-powered helicopter over the oilsands or who is behind the court challenges to the Trans Mountain pipeline, wonder no more.
So, who is behind these trust funds? John D. Rockefeller gained his wealth by founding Standard Oil which has become Exxon Mobil – one of the largest corporations in history. And of course the Hewlett and Packard families are the multimillionaire founders of that computer hardware we all have in our offices.
Canada currently has only one market for our energy resources and that is our neighbour to the south. And in the current dilemma our landlocked resource has been subject to a $40-$50 discount from world oil prices. And why? Only because of one thing – we cannot get our product to market.
The U.S. has us over a barrel because we cannot get our product to tidewater. With the cancellation of the Northern Gateway and Energy East pipelines and the continual delays on both the Keystone and Trans Mountain pipelines, our energy industry is hooped.
Canadian pipelines are being blockaded, but at the same time there are four pipelines being built from the Permian Basin in northwest Texas to the Gulf Coast and pipelines have been built to transport Bakken oil from North Dakota to market.
Canadian pipelines are being shut down by highly active political opposition funded by American trust funds. But the bigger question is why is our energy industry being blocked?
Mainly it is because of these U.S. trust funds bankrolling environmental lobby groups to lobby our governments and fund court challenges essentially stopping them in their tracks. It has also been suggested that these trust funds have become involved in our political processes, particularly in British Columbia and possibly even in Alberta and at the federal level.
Here we have the United States embroiled in a controversy over Russian influences in their national elections and we have U.S. trust funds interfering in Canadian political affairs.
The question is, how do we stop this travesty?
Why is coverage of Vivian Krause and her mission not a front page headline? Is the innate bias in the eyes of the mainstream media so focused on the climate change debate that they ignore this unethical interference in our political processes?
Canadians don’t want the tainted money from these American billion-dollar gorillas, we just want to get our product to market. Canadians should decide what is best for Canada, not foreigners – Yankee go home!
Ken Allred is a former St. Albert alderman and MLA.
