Are we screwed, p.13
Are We Screwed?, page 13
Andrew assumed that the Harper government would deny everything after he went public with his story. It wouldn’t be too hard for Tides and ForestEthics to do the same thing. Without evidence to support his allegations, such denials could easily discredit him. Andrew quietly prepared for this scenario by speaking with several trusted colleagues at ForestEthics and telling them about his plans to contact news outlets about the “Enemy of the State” allegation. “They agreed to confirm off-the-record with any media that came asking that they too had heard about alleged threats to Tides and ForestEthics made by the government,” he said.
Andrew also got in touch with a lawyer and wrote an affidavit describing everything he’d heard from his superiors over the past weeks. “I wanted it to look official,” he explained. “Me doing due diligence and swearing an oath.” Still, none of it was any guarantee that his allegations would be taken seriously in public. “I certainly was worried about that,” Andrew explained.
He was also worried about the optics of being fired by ForestEthics. “My biggest concern was that I’d release all this information,” he explained, “and that if I didn’t time it all properly, I’d get labeled [in the media] as a disgruntled former employee instead of a whistleblower.” So he decided to delay the inevitable as long as he could. When governments have bad news to release, they often wait until a Friday afternoon. That’s when Andrew decided to tell McMillan from Tides Canada that he’d reached out to several local reporters and was going to officially go public with the story on Monday. Because the weekend was starting, “they won’t be able to fire me immediately,’” he said.
Andrew and McMillan didn’t really know each other. “I’d only seen him in the hallways and exchanged pleasantries like ‘Hi, nice to see you’—that kind of thing,” Andrew said. Their meeting was short and tense. “I went in and said, ‘The story is coming out next week,’” Andrew said. McMillan was not happy. Had Andrew considered the jobs he was putting at risk? “McMillan described it as like ‘setting off a bomb in your own house,’” Andrew recalled. But Andrew refused to yield. “We need to share this information with our allies and the public,” Andrew said to McMillan. It was not a comfortable meeting. “You could have cut the tension with a knife,” he said. About twenty minutes after it was over, Andrew’s phone started ringing off the hook.
It didn’t stop for two days. Andrew didn’t answer any calls. “Every senior person at ForestEthics and Tides Canada was trying to stop me from going forward with the story,” he said. “It was intense, it was like out of a movie.” On Saturday morning his supervisor, Pierre Iachetti, left two short voice messages. “I’m sure you’re probably getting [tons] of messages from various folks, but uh, you seriously need to call me,” Iachetti said, according to Andrew’s transcript of the phone message. “We’re hearing some troubling news from Ross … and what I can say is if the information that we have is true there are some serious consequences as of Monday.”50 Andrew didn’t respond. Soon his ForestEthics e-mail account was shut down. Andrew used his personal account to write an e-mail to the group explaining himself. “The Canadian government is attempting to silence the voice of civil society in this country,” he wrote. “As a citizen, that’s not something I can accept.”
ForestEthics leader Todd Paglia responded on Sunday. “You have thrown this bomb whatever it is and have refused to talk to your supervisor, me, and many other staff trying to reach you so we could prepare for whatever it is you have done,” Paglia wrote, according to Andrew’s affidavit. “This is unprofessional and insulting to everyone on this team.”51
By Monday morning, Andrew hadn’t been fired by ForestEthics—not technically. He wanted to keep it that way until the first news reporters got in touch. At home he sat waiting for his phone to ring. Suddenly his buzzer rang instead. It was a courier sent by ForestEthics to deliver his firing papers. “I hung up on him because I didn’t want to get fired just yet,” Andrew explained. Yet the courier was somehow able to enter his apartment building. At Andrew’s door he knocked loudly. “Then he jammed this thick envelope under the door,” Andrew said. By that point the reporters Andrew had reached out to last week were starting to get in contact. When one of them called, Andrew explained, “‘I’ve just been fired.’ ‘Why are you fired?’ the reporter asked. ‘Because I’m sharing this story with you!’” Andrew said.
On Tuesday morning Andrew posted his affidavit online, along with a letter putting it all into context. “I am taking the extraordinary step of risking my career, my reputation and my personal friendships, to act as a whistleblower and expose the undemocratic and potentially illegal pressure the Harper government has apparently applied to silence critics of the Enbridge Northern Gateway oil tanker/pipeline plan,” he wrote.52 He also put it on Facebook. “Hey everyone, I’m all in today against the Prime Minister,” he said.
The first major media stories were now appearing. “Affidavit accuses PMO [prime minister’s office] of threatening environmental group,” read a Canadian Press story.53 Headlines continued to mount. “PMO accused of threatening environmental group,” read a headline on the CBC.54 “Environmentalist’s departure sheds light on tension felt by green groups,” read a headline in the Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper. The novelist Margaret Atwood made #EnemyGate a hashtag on Twitter.
As Andrew had expected, Harper’s government disavowed the entire thing. “The Prime Minister’s Office denies making any of the allegations or saying any of the things that are outlined in [Frank’s] statement,” said government spokesperson Andrew MacDougall in a statement. He refused to comment on the matter further.55
McMillan was also tight-lipped. He put out a statement saying he wouldn’t be doing any interviews about Andrew or his affidavit. “Tides Canada does not speak about our conversations with government, partners, the private sector or other parties,” he said. “I will say that Mr. Frank did not take part in any conversations we’ve had with government and his account of our conversations with government is inaccurate.”56 McMillan was in a tricky position, though. If he completely discredited Andrew he would in effect be siding with the Harper government. He would be playing right into their hands. So within the week McMillan attempted to clarify his comments. “Andrew Frank had the wrong facts but the right idea,” he wrote. McMillan denied that Tides or ForestEthics had ever been threatened by Harper. “But like Frank,” he added, “I am profoundly disturbed by the current political atmosphere” around the tar sands.57
By the end of the week Andrew Frank’s open letter had been viewed nearly seventy thousand times. “This is a letter, it isn’t a Kardashian video,” Andrew said. “People cared about it, and they shared it because it mattered to them in some way.” But McMillan’s comments about the letter’s accuracy, even with the later clarification, left Andrew in an awkward position. “As much as I was trying to push the ‘enemy of the state’ story out and hit the government hard, I also had this rear-guard action where I’m trying to protect my own reputation,” he said. As days went by, Andrew’s frustration began to show. “The elite brand of environmentalism practiced by big foundations like Tides Canada, can, when it matters the most, be more concerned about its own political interests,” Andrew wrote on his blog, than about the safe and sustainable future for his generation he had joined ForestEthics to build. “When telling the truth becomes revolutionary within a social movement, something is wrong,” he argued.58
In doing so, Andrew Frank effectively detached himself from the partisan political process. By going public with his allegations, he’d hoped to show people that the country’s Conservative government was more apt to obey the wishes of tar sands companies than those of regular people. “My cynicism comes from the fact that the government was pulling these strings behind the scenes,” he said. But he’d also cut ties to many of the progressive organizations fighting Harper. “The environmental groups and foundations were under so much pressure that they acted in kind of a cynical way,” he said. He was certain that the “enemy of the state” allegation he made public would’ve had a much larger impact if his old employer had confirmed it. “If it was up to me I wouldn’t have had to worry about [them] trying to slag me and take me down because they were so worried about trying to protect themselves,” Andrew said.
But that’s not what happened. And in the aftermath of the scandal, Andrew often thought about where he fit within Canada’s political system. Clearly there was no place for him in the aggressive expansion of the status quo envisioned by Conservatives like Harper. Yet in a moment when it mattered most, the progressive opposition had chosen—rightly or wrongly—to focus on its own self-preservation rather than on his generation’s future. Andrew was not apathetic, lazy, or ignorant. He still believed that young people like him can and should make a difference. But the traditional political spectrum didn’t seem to present them with very good options. “I feel like so many people [my age] want to be involved in politics,” Andrew said. “But they’re just not involved with the regular political parties. They’re cynical about our system.”
The 2011 federal election that gave Stephen Harper virtually unbridled power to turn Canada into a petrostate (and to go after ForestEthics) was in many ways decided by young voters—or rather, their decision to abstain from participating in it. Less than 40 percent of people under the age of thirty cast a ballot in that election. If 60 percent had voted, the pollster Nik Nanos later calculated, Harper likely wouldn’t have won a majority. By not voting, they increased the ballot power of Harper’s older, white, and male supporters. Older Canadians “are very cynical, they have less confidence in finding solutions,” Nanos observed. But younger people, his years of polling research suggested, “are actually much more hopeful, have a higher level of confidence in finding solutions.” If more of them actually voted, “just the mere act of engaging them could reshape the tone of [politics].”59
But youth voter turnout had been getting worse and worse for decades. In the years following World War II, upward of 75 percent of Canadians voted in elections. But by the 2000s that had decreased to about 60 percent. A study by Elections Canada concluded, “This decline is disproportionately concentrated among the youngest electors,”60 as in the United States and Britain. If the decline couldn’t be reversed, “that has implications for the long-term health of our democratic system.” An op-ed in the Globe and Mail questioned if the problem was past the point of fixing. “The decline of voting in the 21st century may become as striking a phenomenon as the decline of church attendance in the latter part of the 20th,” its editorialists speculated.61
But many observers didn’t realize that people of Andrew’s age are in many ways more political than their elders. “The low voting rate among today’s youth is often considered proof that they’re more apathetic or lazy than any other generation before,” argued the think tank Samara in 2015, but actually youth were more likely to sign a petition, run a civil society group, and share news on social media. “Across 18 forms of political activities,” it found, “Canadians under 30 participate at a rate 11 percentage points higher than those 30 and above.”62 Voting was the exception. “It shows something many millennials have been saying for years. It’s not that they don’t care about politics, it’s just that electoral politics isn’t necessarily catching their imaginations,” as a story in the National Post put it.63
Harper came up for reelection in October 2015. And in the months leading to the vote, no issue exemplified this challenge more than climate change. In the spring I interviewed Julie Van de Valk, a university student in her early twenties who, like many her age, considers global warming to be so urgent that “it’s not something we can wait another day to address.” She was so concerned about it that she spent a Saturday knocking on strangers’ doors across Vancouver to raise awareness of climate solutions. But she refrained from endorsing a specific political party. None of them, neither left nor right, “are addressing climate change with the type of leadership that people who understand the issue want to see,” she explained. “People of my generation, we want to see a politician commit 100 percent to a brighter future.”64
Julie planned to vote in the October election—she wasn’t going to sit this one out. But she felt deeply uninspired by her options. For a young person who believes her generation’s future survival requires us to make transformative changes to our society, supporting a Conservative like Harper was completely out of the question. Yet none of the progressives seemed willing to make those changes either. Both of her left-of-center options, the Liberals and New Democratic Party (NDP), promised to take stronger action on climate change than Harper. Yet neither party could explain how it would rapidly reduce carbon emissions and shift toward clean energy. And both openly supported the tar sands. “That doesn’t do it for me,” she said.65
That left her in the same awkward political position as Andrew Frank. The three and a half years that’d passed since his decision to become a whistleblower hadn’t been easy. He’d burned a lot of bridges. “People afterwards told me on the phone that ‘I respect you and like working with you but I’m not allowed to talk with you,’” he said. And at first he’d a bit of trouble finding work. Several times when he applied for activist jobs, he’d made it far into the hiring process, only to be cut at the very end. “Later people would say, ‘I just want to let you know I thought you had a really great application, but let’s leave it at that,’” he said. “That kind of thing.” He’d been able to pick up some part-time work with indigenous groups, however, and as Canada’s 2015 election approached, he was teaching at a local university.
Often before a new semester even started, many of Andrew’s students knew who he was. “Because they’ll Google me,” he explained. So he began to use the story of his departure from ForestEthics in his classes on climate change and public relations. “I tell my students, ‘I’m progressive, but I’m not partisan. I’m going to share a story, but I’m not sharing it to shape your politics,’” he said. “I want to teach them to be active citizens.” In his opinion, an active citizen is willing to fight for his or her ideals, even if it means detaching from the political institutions claiming to represent them. “When you say, ‘I want my side to win,’ there’s a litmus test of ideological purity,” he said. “I’m like ‘No, it’s not about purity, I just want to get stuff done.’”
Andrew sensed untapped power in this argument. He thought that by applying it to the upcoming election, young people like him and Julie could topple Harper’s nearly decade-long petrostate. In general elections, Canadians don’t vote directly for their leader, as in the United States. Instead they vote for party candidates in specific ridings. Whichever party elects the most candidates gets to make its leader prime minister. The system seemed to favor Harper. Since he was the only strong Conservative option, most right-wing votes went to his candidates. Left-wing voters had two strong options—the NDP and the Liberals—which meant that the progressive vote was often split. In 2011 this allowed Harper’s party to win with under 40 percent of the popular vote. Andrew’s idea was simple. Voters should figure out which progressive candidate had the best shot of winning in their riding—NDP or Liberal, it didn’t matter—and then vote for that candidate. “I am not a member of a political party,” he wrote. “I am a progressive … willing to roll up my sleeves.”66
Across the country many young people were coming to the same conclusion. The strategy became known as ABC—Anything But Conservative. One of its leading proponents was a youth-led activist group known as Leadnow, which convinced 85,000 people to sign a pledge promoting the idea of strategic voting. Its rationale was the same as Andrew’s. “Most people in Canada don’t see the country through a partisan political lens or identify with a political brand,” it explained. “But we want to see change.”67 Leadnow identified thirty-one ridings across the country where Conservative candidates were in close races with progressives. It pored through polling data to figure out which progressive candidate had the best chance of winning, then advised people to vote for that candidate. “I’m so curious to see what’s going to happen,” said Leadnow’s Amara Possian. “In some ways it’s a big experiment.”68
Meanwhile more than 450,000 people, many of them in their twenties and early thirties, RSVP’d to a “Stephen Harper Going Away Party” on Facebook. For them, toppling Harper was more important than rallying behind a specific replacement. “I would vote for a centipede if it would get rid of Harper,” one woman told the Globe and Mail. The newspaper concluded that “‘Anybody But Harper’ has become a kind of war whoop for disaffected voters this election”69—particularly young ones. One of its loudest proponents was the well-known youth activist Brigitte DePape, who traveled the country urging people her age to vote Harper out of office. “I want to do everything in my power to see a government that reflects our values,” she said. DePape was confident young people would listen. “To all those who said ‘the youth vote is dead,’” she argued, “I believe that our generation will prove you wrong.”70 And on Election Day, it did.
My partner, Kara, and I got up early on October 17 to vote. We’d done our research and concluded that the NDP candidate had the best chance of defeating a Conservative in our riding, so that’s who we voted for. Like most people we know, we see ourselves as political independents. We believe our society needs profound structural changes, but we weren’t picky about who implemented them. For now the most important thing was to get Harper out of office. You couldn’t build a new status quo until you rejected the old one. That message was everywhere. As Election Day approached, my social media feeds were flooded with anti-Harper news stories. People who’d never seemed political to me were posting them. You could feel the revolt building. Even the HBO comedian John Oliver urged Canadians: “Don’t vote for Stephen Harper!”
