HOW CANADA’S NEW ELECTION LAW HAS SILENCED POLITICAL DEBATE

People march during a climate strike in Montréal in September 2019. Climate change is a top concern for Canadians, but new Elections Canada rules left civil society organizations fearing they could not speak out on the need for climate action during the election. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes)

It’s almost 2020, and with a minority government in power, another federal election could be upon Canadians sooner than expected.

So as the dust settles on the 2019 vote, it’s important to examine the data on an issue that clouded the election campaign — the impact of new Elections Canada regulations on public debate by civil society organizations.

In June 2019, the federal government amended Canada’s Elections Act. New rules require third parties, including non-profit groups, to register with Elections Canada if they spend more than $500 on “political advertising.” That includes any spending to promote positions on public policy issues on which political parties have taken a stand, or to support or oppose particular candidates and parties.

The new Elections Act also sets specific spending limits on third-party election advertising.

These changes to the Elections Act are important measures to prevent the type of unlimited spending by political action committees (PACs) that followed the Citizens United decision by the United States Supreme Court in 2010. The court ruled that spending limits on third-party election advertising was an unconstitutional restriction of free speech.

Since 2010, what are known as super-PACs have subsequently become major players in American elections, enabling wealthy individuals to exert enormous political influence. Indeed, wealthy donors spent more than US$1.4 billion during the 2016 presidential election campaign.

Silencing voices

The new Elections Canada regulations impose spending limits on third parties ($1,023,400 in the pre-election period and $511,700 in the election period) and specific regulations against collusion between third parties that would prevent the type of unlimited spending by super-PACs in the United States.

However, the new Elections Canada regulations have also played a role in silencing the voices of many Canadian organizations on a wide range of public policy issues — from climate change to health care to international aid.

This chilling effect came into play most powerfully when Elections Canada indicated in a training session for non-profits that organizations with public policy positions on climate change would need to register and report on their spending, given that right-wing candidate Maxime Bernier had made public statements denying climate change.

The silencing impact may not have been intentional, but it is very real and represents a threat to healthy public debate and democracy in Canada. Elections are important opportunities for Canadians to debate public policy, and it’s crucial that civil society groups are able to contribute to those debates.

On the surface, the new Elections Act appears to strike a balance between free speech and excessive influence by wealthy individuals and corporations.

The Elections Act does not prohibit civil society organizations from spending money to promote public policy positions. However, many organizations saw the requirement to register and report on spending as ominous — especially after the crackdown on charities carried out by the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) under Stephen Harper’s Conservative government.

Fears of another crackdown

Justin Trudeau’s government made significant changes to the CRA regulations in 2019 that allow charities to engage much more freely in public policy debates. But many Canadian civil society groups still worry that the federal government will crack down on organizations that criticize its policies.

The regulations also add bureaucratic headaches and expenses to non-profit organizations, many of which cannot afford to pay additional costs for participation in public policy debates.

Staff with many Canadian civil society groups have reported that their organizations did not speak out on public policy issues during the election campaign for fear they’d be penalized by Elections Canada or the CRA.

The silencing effect is also clear in data from Elections Canada.

There are more than 175,000 registered non-profit and charitable organizations in Canada. Only 147 registered to report election advertising in 2019, only 50 reported spending more than $10,000 (the reporting threshold set by Elections Canada) and only two have charitable status.

Climate change a key concern

Climate change was a top concern for Canadians during the 2019 election campaign. However, my analysis of the Elections Canada data shows that only 17 environmental organizations registered, and only seven reported spending more than $10,000 (for a cumulative total of $634,307) during the election period.

Similarly, while Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer made Canada’s international aid an election issue by proposing to cut it by 25 per cent, only five international social justice organizations registered, and none of them reported spending over $10,000.

Health care is always an important issue to Canadians, but just one health-sector organization (the Canadian Medical Association) registered with Elections Canada, spending $113,242.

The data suggests the new rules kept conservative groups quiet too. Only one gun rights organization reported any spending ($32,091) and just seven explicitly pro-Conservative organizations registered, spending a total of $690,922. As of Oct. 14, 2019 — a week before the election —the total reported by all organizations was just over $9.4 million.

Canada’s new Elections Act may have prevented the type of mammoth spending seen in the United States via super-PACs, but it’s been at the expense of silencing many Canadian organizations with important positions on public policy issues.

With a minority government in Parliament, Canadians could soon head to the polls again, so there may not be much time to make these changes. SOURCEElections Canada needs to do more to make sure that the new regulations do not block public policy debates. It should also review the $500 threshold for requiring organizations to register with Elections Canada.

Eyeing federal election, Canada’s oil lobby has been arming itself with personal data

This year, for the first time, Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers has registered with Elections Canada as a third-party advertiser. Illustration by Louise Reimer

Canada’s largest oil and gas lobby group wanted to know more about its supporters.

Their music tastes, the cars they liked, their age, their race, how far they’d go in supporting the energy industry. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) blasted the survey out to its email list in July 2018, but didn’t include terms and conditions and has since declined to say how it planned to use the detailed personal data.

This summer, as the federal election drew closer, CAPP paid for promoted Facebook ads linking to a website that asked for data in the form of a pledge. That link asked CAPP supporters to sign a “pledge to Vote Energy” — signalling support for a seven-page “Vote Energy Platform” — by entering their name, email and postal code. CAPP poured tens of thousands of dollars into sponsored Facebook posts linking to the pledge.

“Canada’s only credible path to meeting its Paris commitments is through increased exports of Canadian natural gas,” reads one part of the platform. (Experts would disagree.)

It’s not clear how CAPP — an extraordinarily powerful and well-resourced lobby group whose membership list is dominated by foreign-owned companies — is using the data it collects. It didn’t answer specific questions from National Observer, and hasn’t divulged its reasoning publicly. But CAPP’s methods mirror political strategies used by American lobbyists to halt climate policy, a National Observer investigation has found.

Experts consulted by National Observer said such data could be used to shape public opinion. By “micro-targeting” members of the public who the data suggests will be sympathetic to CAPP messaging, the lobby could build a network of industry-coordinated grassroots support in key battlegrounds in the federal election, the experts said.

“CAPP is using techniques that we saw developed, to be frank, in Brexit and in the U.S. around the 2016 presidential election and adapting that to the Canadian context” – @MelaneeLThomas

CAPP’s American counterpart already uses these techniques to block climate action, and in 2015, CAPP said in a now-archived press release that it planned to adopt them. Such techniques used “north of the border could make a material difference in the public discourse over energy issues like pipeline development and hydraulic fracturing,” CAPP said at the time.

“(Data collection and micro-targeting) are a key part in building the social-media echo chambers that make people more vulnerable to one-sided messaging that reinforces highly selective and one-dimensional views of Canada and the world,” said Shane Gunster, a communications professor at Simon Fraser University who researches the oil industry’s use of social media.

In this year’s federal election, the climate crisis is a top issue for the first time. The public increasingly supports taking action on the issue, which, at the level of federal policy, has given rise to a nationwide price on carbon as well as stricter air pollution regulations. At the same time, CAPP is campaigning for the opposite: it wants the removal of emissions standards and more government support for the expansion of the fossil fuel industry, the group’s Vote Energy Platform says.

Advocacy groups of all political stripes have always tried to sway the electorate in favour of causes they support, and well-resourced ones like CAPP have always been particularly good at it, said Melanee Thomas, a political scientist at the University of Calgary and Eakin Fellow at McGill Institute for the Study of Canada.

But the data collection aspect of CAPP’s activities is an “escalation of that trend,” Thomas said. Though that escalation has been visible in the U.S. in recent years, it hasn’t yet been widely seen in Canada, she added….

Canada’s largest oil and gas lobby group wanted to know more about its supporters.

Their music tastes, the cars they liked, their age, their race, how far they’d go in supporting the energy industry. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) blasted the survey out to its email list in July 2018, but didn’t include terms and conditions and has since declined to say how it planned to use the detailed personal data.

This summer, as the federal election drew closer, CAPP paid for promoted Facebook ads linking to a website that asked for data in the form of a pledge. That link asked CAPP supporters to sign a “pledge to Vote Energy” — signalling support for a seven-page “Vote Energy Platform” — by entering their name, email and postal code. CAPP poured tens of thousands of dollars into sponsored Facebook posts linking to the pledge.

“Canada’s only credible path to meeting its Paris commitments is through increased exports of Canadian natural gas,” reads one part of the platform. (Experts would disagree.)

It’s not clear how CAPP — an extraordinarily powerful and well-resourced lobby group whose membership list is dominated by foreign-owned companies — is using the data it collects. It didn’t answer specific questions from National Observer, and hasn’t divulged its reasoning publicly. But CAPP’s methods mirror political strategies used by American lobbyists to halt climate policy, a National Observer investigation has found.

Experts consulted by National Observer said such data could be used to shape public opinion. By “micro-targeting” members of the public who the data suggests will be sympathetic to CAPP messaging, the lobby could build a network of industry-coordinated grassroots support in key battlegrounds in the federal election, the experts said.

“CAPP is using techniques that we saw developed, to be frank, in Brexit and in the U.S. around the 2016 presidential election and adapting that to the Canadian context” – @MelaneeLThomas

CAPP’s American counterpart already uses these techniques to block climate action, and in 2015, CAPP said in a now-archived press release that it planned to adopt them. Such techniques used “north of the border could make a material difference in the public discourse over energy issues like pipeline development and hydraulic fracturing,” CAPP said at the time.

“(Data collection and micro-targeting) are a key part in building the social-media echo chambers that make people more vulnerable to one-sided messaging that reinforces highly selective and one-dimensional views of Canada and the world,” said Shane Gunster, a communications professor at Simon Fraser University who researches the oil industry’s use of social media.

In this year’s federal election, the climate crisis is a top issue for the first time. The public increasingly supports taking action on the issue, which, at the level of federal policy, has given rise to a nationwide price on carbon as well as stricter air pollution regulations. At the same time, CAPP is campaigning for the opposite: it wants the removal of emissions standards and more government support for the expansion of the fossil fuel industry, the group’s Vote Energy Platform says.

Advocacy groups of all political stripes have always tried to sway the electorate in favour of causes they support, and well-resourced ones like CAPP have always been particularly good at it, said Melanee Thomas, a political scientist at the University of Calgary and Eakin Fellow at McGill Institute for the Study of Canada.

But the data collection aspect of CAPP’s activities is an “escalation of that trend,” Thomas said. Though that escalation has been visible in the U.S. in recent years, it hasn’t yet been widely seen in Canada, she added.

(Top) A screenshot of a question CAPP asked Energy Citizen supporters in summer 2018; (bottom) A screenshot of the number of people who have taken CAPP’s Vote Energy pledge as of Sept. 26, 2019.

In an August 2018 email, Chelsie Klassen, a spokesperson for CAPP, didn’t answer specific questions about the motivation behind the survey, how many people responded and how the data would be used. The survey “was sent to Canada’s Energy Citizens (CEC) members to help us better understand their interests and improve our content,” she said.

CAPP also didn’t respond to repeated, detailed questions sent in early September 2019 about the Vote Energy pledge and how data collection fits with the lobby group’s election strategy.

“We do not respond to media requests from the National Observer,” a CAPP spokesperson said in response to a different story earlier this month.

All of this raises alarm bells, Thomas said: “Why would they need that kind of information?”

‘The same type of thing that political parties do to win’

At a Calgary event in April 2015, CAPP hosted an official from the oil lobby’s U.S. counterpart, the American Petroleum Institute (API), who made a presentation about micro-targeted campaigns. Deryck Spooner, then the senior director of external mobilization at API, was there to teach CAPP how to implement campaign strategies he tested in the U.S.

“We have won,” Spooner said, in everything from restrictions on oil and gas to climate change regulations.

In one case, an API-led group successfully opposed an attempt by environmentalists to block Canadian oil from being shipped through a harbour in South Portland, Me., CAPP said in a now-deleted press release. API also campaigned in favour of a shipping terminal for liquefied natural gas in Cove Point, Md., near Chesapeake Bay, a project that was approved by federal regulators in 2014.

In an audio recording of his speech at the event, Spooner outlined how API did it. They started by gathering detailed voter profiles through electoral records, surveys and online consumer data, he said, allowing API to micro-target its campaigns — through social media, flyers and other efforts — to areas where it could most effectively elect oil-friendly politicians and defeat policy measures addressing climate change.

“To date, we have about 32.8 million (voter profiles) in 34 states across America,” Spooner said. “That’s important because this is the same type of thing that political parties do to win… This is how we’re actually able to apply pressure on elected officials.”

Through this, Spooner said, API could “impact” 275 members of the U.S. Congress and 34 state governors, along with “thousands” of local governments. Armed with detailed voter profiles, API also built a “grassroots” pro-oil group called Energy Citizens that could mobilize to vote on key issues, Spooner said.

API grew the Energy Citizens base in part by enlisting its member companies to help recruit their employees, investors and other supporters, according to a leaked memo obtained by the environmental advocacy group Greenpeace in 2009.

In a now-archived press release about the speaker series, CAPP praised Spooner’s methods and announced its intent to adopt them.

“CAPP has begun down this road with the creation of its own Energy Citizens campaign,” the 2015 press release said.

“While it will take time to build the kind of numbers API has, it is affirming at these early stages to see what kind of a difference true grassroots engagement can make.”

Ever since public opposition to Northern Gateway — led by First Nations, local communities and environmental groups — resulted in the cancellation of the energy project, CAPP and the fossil fuel industry as a whole have worried that their traditional tools of influencing public policy and governments aren’t as effective as they once were, said Gunster.

“They’ve put lots of resources into supplementing them with public outreach initiatives, to subsidize the participation of pro-oil constituencies in media and public debates about energy, climate and environmental politics,” Gunster said by email.

“Collecting data about Canadians who can be politically mobilized in support of the fossil fuel industry has been a central objective of CAPP’s public outreach campaigns over the last several years.”

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