A Peek into Big Oils Lobbying Playbook with Environmental Defence

Roy L Hales/Cortes Currents - Environmental Defence just released a report showing that last year oil and gas company lobbyists were targeting the Conservative Party, in preference to the Canadian Government, by more than a 2 to 1 ratio. Cortes Currents interviewed Emilia Belliveau, lead author of ‘Big Oil’s Playbook, A Summary of Big Oil’s 2024 Federal Lobbying’ and asked Max Thaysen, from the Cortes Island Climate Action Network for his insights.

Emilia Belliveau:  “Environmental Defence is a charity, so we are nonpartisan. What I can do is simply relay the facts, which are that the Bloc Quebecois and the Green Party did not take any lobbyist meetings. The NDP took a very small number, four. Then you have most of the lobby meetings targeting the Federal Liberals and the Federal Conservatives. The Federal Liberals had 62 meetings with ministers and 29 meetings with backbencher MPs, and Conservative MPs took 216 lobby meetings.”

 Cortes Currents: That’s 91 contacts with government ministers and Liberal MPs, which is less than half of the 216 meetings the lobbyists had with Conservative party members.

Belliveau said this was a change from 2023 when gas and oil lobbyists met with Canada's two leading parties about 200 times each. (203 Liberal meetings vs 197 Conservative meetings.)

Max Thaysen, a member of the Cortes Climate Action Network pointed out, “The numbers presented for who the fossil fuel companies were lobbying, means that they are hoping for and planning on a Conservative government. This would be very strongly in their favour as far as I can tell and probably as far as they can tell. That's something that we need to consider when we're making our decisions and taking action leading up to our celebration of democracy (voting day), whenever that comes.”

 Emilia Belliveau: “Environmental Defense tracks the fossil fuel industry's lobbying of the Federal government in order to get a window into the ways that they're trying to influence climate policy. That has huge implications because we need ambitious government climate policy in order to tackle climate change at the scale that's really required.”

Max Thaysen: “To quote one scientific paper that I'm still working through, ‘We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster.’ This is a global emergency. We can't really remember that often enough and that should form the context of how we interpret these kinds of activities.”

Cortes Currents: What about meetings that are initiated by the government or by one of the parties? Are those tracked?

Emilia Belliveau: “When we try and track lobbying, what we really see is only meetings that are initiated by lobbyists get tracked in the government's registry. If the government itself requests a meeting, or sets up a working group, which we know they have done with certain oil and gas companies on major projects, those meetings don't count as lobby meetings. So they're not filed in the public record.”

“There's actually way more contact with the government that we know is happening, but can't report on in our analysis. We've seen some really wonderful investigative journalism. For example, in the past year, the Narwhal did a great investigation into TC Energy where they revealed lots of other ways that industry is trying to influence government. Lobbying is just one tactic, in this real playbook that they have, for trying to shape government policy in favor of fossil fuels.”