Are we screwed, p.12
Are We Screwed?, page 12
All this has caused young people not only to distrust our political system but to reject it. A 2014 Pew survey suggested that half of people my age refuse to identify with any political party. They see themselves as “political independents.” There is a prevailing sense that the choice between the Republican and Democratic parties is a false one. Only 31 percent of Millennials see any major difference between the parties, compared to 49 percent of Boomers. These are the “highest levels of political disaffiliation” that Pew has “recorded for any generation in [a] quarter-century.”30 To the coalition of young climate and racial justice activists who marched through Washington, D.C., in 2015, the explanation was obvious. “Today, we face a true crisis of democracy,” they wrote. “While politicians and the media continue to talk about left versus right … [we are] talking about a different direction: forward.”31
The first time I experienced our broken political system firsthand was in the winter of 2011, when I accidently ran into Gary Doer inside the Canadian embassy in Washington, D.C. I was in the U.S. capital to interview the oil industry lobbyists we met in Chapter 3. Doer was Canada’s ambassador to the United States. His diplomatic position was among the most influential in the world. I’d sent more than a dozen interview requests to the embassy. I badly wanted to ask Doer about something I could just not wrap my mind around. Before he became ambassador in October 2009, he was among the most progressive politicians in Canada. He had stood up against the powers that be. He won accolades for fighting climate change. But something changed when he got to Washington. He became friends with all the oil companies. He began blocking the progress he’d previously fought for. What was going on?
Doer first made his name as premier of Manitoba, an often overlooked central Canadian province best known for being the place where Neil Young grew up. But under Doer’s leadership, it won global recognition for its efforts to make our society less environmentally destructive. Doer was a huge supporter of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. As the United States rejected the climate change treaty, Doer promised that Manitoba would meet its obligations two years early. He vowed to go four times beyond the Kyoto targets: “In doing so, we can help to set the stage for a new, exciting and more sustainable economy in Canada.” International media soon took notice. Business Week picked Doer as one of the top twenty people on the planet fighting climate change. “Under Doer,” it observed, “sustainable development has become an economic lynchpin.”32
Doer had always been politically ambitious, but nobody could have predicted he would suddenly resign as premier after ten years to become Canada’s ambassador to the United States. Or that instead of continuing the fight for the new economic system that he began in Manitoba, one that valued survival of the planet just as much as short-term profits, he would do the exact opposite. That he would host lobbying events with Exxon and Chevron. That he would become a tireless champion of tar sands pipelines like the Keystone XL. That he would fight climate laws that could hurt the industry’s profits and describe the environmental impact of tar sands as “very small.” That he would go from being an attacker of our status quo to one of its most powerful defenders. “My view is the oil is coming,” he said. “It’s just a question of how it gets there.”33
None of it made any sense to me. What happened to the progressive leader who’d once declared that “we simply cannot afford to wait to take action on the very serious issue of climate change”? The one who’d promised to “leave a legacy of clean air and clean energy for our future generations”? The Canadian embassy refused to grant me an opportunity to ask. It rejected weeks and weeks of interview requests. And so on my last day in Washington, I decided to visit the embassy anyway. I had no game plan. I didn’t know what to expect. I simply showed up at the hulking Arthur Erickson–designed building on Pennsylvania Avenue and puttered around the lobby. I was about to leave when I heard voices behind me. Wouldn’t it be something if one of them belonged to Doer? I thought. I turned around, and to my astonishment, there he was.
I could think of only two plausible reasons Gary Doer had abandoned the progressive ideals he’d fought for as premier—and neither reflected very well on our political system. The first was that his ideals were simply trumped by ambition. Doer was good-looking and charming. He knew how to get people’s attention. During his earliest days in politics, he drove sports cars and wore tailored suits. He must have sensed his potential to rise higher in politics than leader of an overlooked Canadian province. During a press conference to announce his resignation as premier in 2009, his excitement was noticeable to several reporters. “What am I going to do next?” he said, “Well, I’m not going to be watching soaps.” The next day Prime Minister Harper announced Doer as Canada’s ambassador to the United States.34
This was by far the most important diplomatic posting in Canada—it’s among the more influential in the entire world. Doer would now have direct and regular access to the White House. His job was to represent America’s largest trading partner and its biggest supplier of foreign oil. Influential U.S. environmental groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) were familiar with Doer’s progressive positions on the climate. They knew he’d tried to build a new type of economy far less destructive than our current one. They also knew that as U.S. ambassador, Doer would have to do the opposite. “It was very interesting to many of us to observe him accepting this [ambassador] position knowing that a big part of his portfolio would have to be promoting tar sands,” the NRDC’s Susan Casey-Lefkowitz explained.
But they figured that if anyone could navigate the contradiction of pushing for a new economic model while also promoting an old one, it would be him. “I thought Gary Doer would become the person that basically acknowledged we have a problem with Alberta’s oil sands, but that we were doing everything possible to address that problem,” said Danielle Droitsch, a senior policy analyst at the NRDC.35 She was badly mistaken. The new ambassador used his access to the Obama administration—“visitor logs show Doer has been a frequent visitor to the White House,” read a Bloomberg story36—to fight any new restrictions on the tar sands. When the EPA raised concerns about the industry’s soaring carbon emissions, Doer accused it of “distortion and omission.”37
In Canada, Doer had won the praise of environmentalists. In the United States, he now won it from oil companies. Doer worked so hard to promote the Keystone XL pipeline that the company trying to build it, TransCanada, sent him a thank-you note. “Gary,” reads an e-mail from the company that I later obtained through a Freedom of Information request. “I just wanted to send a quick note to thank you and your team for all of the hard work and perseverance in helping get us this far, I know it has made a big difference.” It added: “Hopefully, we can connect when I am in DC in mid September.” Doer responded several days later. “Thanks,” he wrote. “Look forward to seeing you soon.”38 Doer was a big deal in Washington. His phone calls always got answered. Had he simply decided to trade his ideals for power?
Perhaps. But I had a second explanation for why Gary Doer so readily abandoned his ideals: maybe he never had any to begin with. “[Doer] has contextual intelligence,” the University of Manitoba professor Paul Thomas has argued. “He can read situations in a very insightful way.” Historically, Manitoba has been a very progressive province. To gain and hold on to power there, Doer knew it made good political sense to fight for strong environmental policies. “He is an immensely pragmatic politician,” said Keith Stewart from Greenpeace. “As premier of Manitoba, being good on climate is good politics.”39 It made less sense as U.S. ambassador. If Doer’s ideals were simply a means to power, perhaps he’d dropped them when they were no longer useful.
How else could you explain the startling disparity between his actions as premier and as ambassador? In Manitoba, Doer hadn’t only pushed for a new status quo—he’d actively fought the expansion of our current one. During his second term as premier, the province’s utility announced a plan to build a power transmission line along the east side of Lake Winnipeg. Doer rejected it in favor of rerouting the line, which though costlier would avoid industrializing the pristine boreal forest. To Doer, the boreal forest was “the greatest undiscovered area anywhere in North America.”40 But later as ambassador, he dismissed criticisms that the tar sands were destroying that same ecosystem. “Come on up,” he said. “You’ll fly over a lot of Boreal Forest.”41 He didn’t mention you’d also see strip mines eleven times larger than the island of Manhattan.
Here was a politician who in 2006 had signed an agreement with then-California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, committing them “to work co-operatively to the fullest possible extent … to advance greenhouse gas emission reductions.”42 Three years later Schwarzenegger brought in a policy that would restrict the sale of tar sands in California, equivalent to taking half a million cars off the road—but the new ambassador told him to back off. “Doer suggested [the policy] didn’t make much sense,” the news agency Canadian Press reported.43 None of it made much sense to environmentalists. “Do I think it’s odd, given [Doer’s] views on climate change, that he is also promoting the use of tar-sands oil in the United States?” said Richard Brooks of Greenpeace. “Certainly, on the surface, it doesn’t seem to line up.”44
Others were more direct. “What became of Gary Doer the green premier?” Environmental Defense policy director Matt Price wrote in an op-ed. “It is sad to lose Gary Doer to the tar sands.” After years of fighting to change the status quo, Price lamented, “Doer is enthusiastically selling Americans on the do-nothing approach … on climate change.” The ambassador didn’t seem to care what people like Price thought. “You’re green, you’re not green. You’re this, you’re that,” Doer later told a magazine in Canada. “I don’t live in a world where I think you kayak to England. I do believe we can improve on efficiencies on oil consumption. But I’ll still drive to the lake on the weekends. We don’t live in a world of absolutes, and I don’t either.”45 It made me wonder: Had Doer’s professed green ideals ever been real?
That was the question going through my head as I turned around and met Doer’s eye in the front lobby of Canada’s embassy. Here was my chance to finally ask him. I cleared my throat and walked toward the ambassador. “Excuse me, Gary Doer?” I said. “I was wondering if I could ask you a question.” Doer didn’t look all that pleased and started to back toward the security checkpoint. He raised a hand defensively around hip level, and his eyes shifted from side to side. “Actually, I’m hosting something right now,” he said. “But if you can give me your number I can call—or better yet, contact my press secretary.” I didn’t have time to answer that his press secretary had already received and rejected requests for an interview I’d been sending his office for several weeks. Before I could say anything, the ambassador was gone.
At this point, security was glaring at me. I figured I should leave. Outside, the skies opened up, and it began pouring rain. On Pennsylvania Avenue men in expensive suits held briefcases over their heads and ran for cover. I found shelter under an alcove. As I waited for the storm to pass, I tried to process the complicated emotions I was feeling. I’d been meeting with oil lobbyists all week long. But my chance run-in with Doer felt different somehow—it felt personal. I kept repeating the scene in my head—Doer’s hand raised in defense, his shifting eyes—until finally I understood why. The moment he’d retreated behind the security gate was the moment when I realized our political system was broken. Left or right, it didn’t seem to make a difference. So long as people like Doer ran our system, the choice was false.
Andrew Frank went to work for ForestEthics during one of the most harrowing periods for civil society in Canadian history. It began in 2011, when the conservative political leader Stephen Harper, whose base was in the tar sands province of Alberta, won a majority of seats in Canada’s parliament and was reelected prime minister. Harper had unbridled power to do whatever he wanted—much like when Donald Trump took power with a Republican Congress. “For decades, the world has thought of Canada as America’s friendly northern neighbor—a responsible, earnest, if somewhat boring, land of hockey fans and single-payer healthcare,” the journalist Andrew Nikiforuk wrote in Foreign Policy. But under Harper, “a dark secret [now] lurks in the northern forests. Over the last decade, Canada has not so quietly become a … rogue petrostate. It’s no longer America’s better half, but a dystopian vision of the continent’s energy-soaked future.”46
To fully realize that vision, though, Harper first had to push through the Northern Gateway pipeline that would let tar sands companies like Exxon sell their oil to China. And with public opposition to the project rising, he decided that civil society groups such as ForestEthics had to be neutralized. He would use the tax code as a weapon. Many activist groups are considered “charities” for tax purposes. This lets them receive funding from philanthropic organizations outside the country. The tax code prohibits charities from participating in explicitly political activities. In the past, this had never been much of an issue, but Harper realized that a strict reading of the tax code could be used to remove the charitable status of the groups fighting a pipeline he’d deemed a “national priority.” It could be used to cut off their funding.
Andrew Frank’s employer was particularly exposed. The entire budget for ForestEthics was funded by a San Francisco–based charity, Tides. With an annual income of almost $100 million, Tides gives out hundreds of grants supporting immigration reform, climate change activism, and many other progressive causes. ForestEthics literally couldn’t exist without its charitable status. In early 2012 that vulnerability became painfully clear. Canada’s natural resources minister Joe Oliver released an open letter accusing groups such as ForestEthics of using “funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest.”47 And while on a state visit to China not long afterward, Harper vowed to “put the interests of Canadians ahead of foreign money and influence.”48 To Andrew’s employer, the implication was clear: Harper’s petrostate was coming after them.
Around that time Andrew and other staffers from the group’s Vancouver office were called into a meeting. A senior supervisor informed them about a conversation that had recently taken place between the prime minister’s office and Tides. In that conversation, Tides Canada’s leader, Ross McMillan, was informed that the Harper government considered ForestEthics to be an “enemy of the state.” And if McMillan didn’t cut off funding and support to ForestEthics, Andrew recalled, the government threatened to “take down” the other charitable work—including activism on AIDS, homelessness, sustainable food and domestic violence—that Tides was doing in Canada. No one at the meeting believed what they were hearing. “We were just shocked,” Andrew said.
One woman in the meeting, an administrative coordinator, started to cry. “She was really freaked out,” Andrew said. “She had a husband who wasn’t a full citizen in Canada so she was worried about the implications.” Everybody was instructed to stay quiet while leaders at ForestEthics and Tides figured out what to do next. Andrew had trouble sleeping in the days that followed. He lost his appetite. There was talk about using encrypted e-mail—and even about being careful on the phone. People “began looking over their shoulder, out of fear and paranoia, because their own government might be watching them,” Andrew claimed.49
Initially Andrew’s colleagues at ForestEthics made plans to strike back. “People were talking and planning about what we should do,” he said. But two weeks passed with barely a word from his superiors. Finally Andrew was informed “that we would not be going public with the story,” he said. If ForestEthics had its charitable status revoked, it would lose all its funding. And Tides Canada was worried about its own existence. It too depended on charitable status to fund dozens of progressive projects.
Andrew sympathized with those fears. But did they outweigh the blatant evidence that our political system was broken? “You had the government trying to pressure and defang one of the environmental watchdogs,” he said. “If it wasn’t illegal, at the very least it was strongly immoral.” Andrew soon came to what he described as a “huge and uncomfortable realization.” The only way the story could get out was if he made it public himself: by leaking it to Canada’s news media, making the alleged threat into a matter of public record and forcing Harper onto the defensive.
Yet in making sensitive information public, Andrew would be disobeying a direct order from the Tides and ForestEthics leadership. He knew that once the story appeared he was going to be fired. He knew it’d be tough to get another job. He knew his employer would deny everything and attack his reputation. “I also knew as soon as I thought about it that I had to do it,” he said. But there were a couple issues he had to take care of first. Andrew had no direct proof that the Harper government had actually called ForestEthics an “enemy of the state”—or that it had threatened to revoke Tides’s charitable status in Canada. Andrew hadn’t been in the room during any discussion between the government and Tides. Nor had he even spoken directly with those leaders. All his information had come at second- or thirdhand.
