Who could lose social licence to BC eco-activists, who consistently get facts wrong, don’t understand basic technical issues, whose analyses are based on junk methodology?
Have pipeline companies lost social licence in British Columbia? This is a claim often heard from pipeline opponents. And while the opponents may be right, they shouldn’t be.
Al Monaco, CEO of Enbridge Inc. Photo: Handout.
Enbridge (Northern Gateway Project) and Kinder Morgan (Trans Mountain expansion) are the companies in question. As everyone not living under a rock knows, these two proposals have engendered fierce opposition from eco-activists and BC First Nations.
That opposition has seriously eroded the “social licence” the companies need to build and operate their pipelines.
Think of social licence as a company’s reputation in the community. If a company has healthy relationships with community members and is generally regarded favourably, governments and regulatory bodies can more easily approve development applications. But if the inverse is true – if the company is thought of as a pariah – then approval is uncertain because governments and bureaucrats rarely buck concerted public opinion.
According to a June Nanos poll, Northern Gateway faces what seems like insurmountable opposition: only 29 per cent support it, while “34 per cent prefer the project not be approved and another 33
per cent want the project delayed for further review.”
Kinder Morgan’s numbers are similar, with only 29 per cent strongly or moderately supporting Trans Mountain, but 63 per cent strongly or moderately opposing, according to an Insights West poll commissioned by the City of Burnaby.
Why are these numbers so dismal for the pipeline projects?
Ian Anderson, president of Kinder Morgan Canada. Photo: Kinder Morgan.
The answer – or part of it, anyway – is tucked away in the Nanos report: “Environmental groups in BC and Aboriginal leaders in BC are more likely to be considered credible or somewhat credible on the issue of the pipeline (75 per cent and 71 per cent respectively).”
As a journalist who often reports and writes about energy issues, including those in BC, I find those numbers astonishing.
Why?
Because, in my experience, eco-activists are the least credible sources of information and analysis on energy issues. They frequently get technical facts wrong. Worse yet, they rarely show any interest in getting them right.
Here’s just one example of many I could provide.
A few years ago, I interviewed Adrienne Carr, a Green Party executive and a City of Vancouver councillor, about a dispute between Kinder Morgan and Chevron, owner of the Burnaby refinery. She completely mischaracterized the dispute, casting it as a case of “tar sands” crude oil displacing conventional crude. I had written the story a day or two before, and interviewed managers for both companies. The facts are that the dispute was really a commercial beef and had nothing to do with the type of crude in the pipeline.
Carr would have none of it and spent a good part of the interview trying to bully me into accepting her version of the story (read my column here). You think Conservative MPs under the oppressive thumb of Stephen Harper practice strict message control? Tory backbenchers have nothing on Adrienne Carr.
Eco-acivist credibility is so low with me that when reporting on stories about technical issues, I no longer seek comment from Greenpeace or Forest Ethics or any of the plethora of associated environmental groups.
Why provide a platform for blatantly incorrect information?
And it’s not just environmental groups. The SFU commissioned a study by American consultants that claimed Kinder Morgan’s estimated economic benefits of Trans Mountain were grossly inflated. I interviewed both the SFU professor who supervised the project and the Conference Board of Canada economist who wrote the Kinder Morgan study.
Turns out the SFU consultants got their methodology backward. And they used the wrong economic multipliers to do their calculations (read my column here).
Why do BC eco-activists get away with the time-worn propaganda strategy of twisting and ignoring facts in such spectacular fashion?
One, a gullible BC media. The Vancouver Sun tries hard and its coverage is usually balanced and informed, but the electronic media and the smaller newspapers have been completely captured by the activists.
Two, a loud, activist “alternative media.” These are generally websites that claim to be media, but in reality are simply echo chambers for each other and the eco-activists. Examples include The Commonsense Canadian, The Vancouver Observer, and WestCoast Native News. The BC alternative media make brilliant use of social media, as do the eco-activists themselves.
Three, the energy industry’s anemic attempts – pathetic, really – to communicate with the BC public. Enbridge’s attempts to sell Northern Gateway will be used by as a case study to teach future students of public relations what not to do. Kinder Morgan is marginally better, but just marginally.
Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain expansion projects are losing – or have already lost – social licence in BC because eco-activists handily bested the pipeline companies at the PR game.
Enbridge and Kinder Morgan are ill-prepared, arrogant, and incompetent communicators. I think it’s fair to say they are enjoying the (lack of) public support they richly earned.
Think about it. They can’t muster more than a feeble push back against eco-activists who consistently get facts wrong. Who don’t understand basic technical issues. Whose analyses are based on junk methodology.
If the pipeline companies can’t earn social licence in the face of that sort of opposition, perhaps they don’t deserve it.
Markham Hislop is the publisher of Beacon News and Beacon Energy News, and regularly reports and writes about Canadian energy issues.