It’s the end of the Canadian Energy Centre (CEC) as we know it, an Alberta Energy spokesperson confirmed to Global News on June 11.
The “important work” of the multimillion-dollar trolling effort, otherwise known as the war room, will be integrated into the province’s intergovernmental relations department, marking the end of an era.
My career wouldn’t be what it is today without the war room, which was established by former premier Jason Kenney in December 2019 as part of his “fight back” strategy against the fossil fuel industry’s perceived foes.
As a relatively unknown reporter at the Medicine Hat News tasked with periodically writing opinion columns, I was privileged to have space to write what columnists at the Postmedia-dominated big city papers would never say.
On Dec. 11, 2019, Kenney officially unveiled the CEC alongside Energy Minister Sonya Savage and former Calgary Herald hack Tom Olsen, the failed UCP candidate who became the CEC’s CEO.
I knew the notion of a publicly funded private corporation established solely to argue with environmentalists was too absurd not to lampoon.
I penned a column, headlined, “Energy war room an expensive joke at best,” referring to its $30-million price tag at the time, which appeared in the Saturday, Dec. 14 paper.
I came into the office on Monday with an email from CEC director of external communications Grady Semmens, another former Herald newshound, sent to me and the newspaper’s publisher, which read:
Good morning. I just wanted to reach out to let you know that we will provide a response to clarify many of the comments and inaccuracies in Mr. Appel’s column.... I will have you something on Monday afternoon and would appreciate if you could run it as an OpEd [sic] as quickly as possible.
Without thinking, I screengrabbed the email and tweeted it out with the caption, “Bring it on, war room.” Almost instantly, I was plucked from relative obscurity, caught in a storm of debate over whether the government overstepped its bounds by demanding the News reprint their propaganda, a demand to which the News regrettably acquiesced.
Don Braid, a Calgary Herald columnist I generally hold in low regard,1 described me in a Dec. 19 column as “an instant resistance hero” and a “tough young reporter-columnist in the Hat.”
A journalist never wants to become the story. Fortunately for me, what followed was a series of CEC ineptitudes, blowups and inanities that overshadowed my brief run-in with the war room.
Here are my favourites, counted down in order. Thanks for the memories!
5. Ripping Off Its Logo … Twice
Before its launch, the CEC made the curious decision not to check if its logo was already in use.
The original CEC logo, which consisted of three bent angles pointed like arrows, looked suspiciously similar to the one used by a Boston-based publicly traded company, Progress Software. This was odd, considering the war room hired a Calgary-based company, Lead & Anchor, to design its logo.
“This is an unfortunate situation but we are committed to making the necessary corrections to our visual identity,” said the CEC’s Olsen on Dec. 19, 2019. “We understand this was a mistake and we are in discussions with our agency to determine how it happened.”
Before the end of the year, the CEC was subject to threatened legal action from California-based software company TK Technologies Inc., which noted a striking resemblance between the war room’s second attempt at a logo and its own.
In the new year, Olsen insisted the CEC was sticking with its second logo, but by summer its online presence was quietly updated with a new copyright violation-proof logo, consisting of the words Canadian Energy Centre in white text over a dark blue background, with a red line to its left.
4. Pretending to be Journalists
In between its stolen logos, Globe and Mail reporter James Keller found that CEC content creators were conducting interviews for articles while posing as reporters and failing to disclose that they’re government-funded propagandists.
Vancouver chef Donald Gyurkovits, who was featured by the CEC in an article about the virtues of cooking with natural gas, wasn’t thrilled when Keller informed him the reporters he spoke to weren’t reporters at all.
“I live in British Columbia,” Gyurkovits said. “I don’t want an oil pipeline or a gas pipeline going through my backyard.”
The Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) accused the CEC of blurring the lines between journalism and propaganda, fuelling distrust of media.
“Governments, they want to support a position, they want to get people to vote for them. They can do PR, but it’s not journalism,” said then-CAJ president Karyn Pugliese.
“What they’re doing is they’re spinning. And they’re welcome to spin, but when they masquerade that as journalism, it’s completely dishonest.”
3. Shamed by the Allan Inquiry
In addition to establishing a war room to spread propaganda about Alberta oil and gas, Kenney promised on the 2019 campaign trail to launch an inquiry into B.C.-based salmon blogger Vivian Krause’s hypothesis that Canadian environmentalists are on the take of U.S. financial interests. Promise made, promise kept.
The inquiry, led by forensic accountant and UCP donor Steve Allan, released its final report in October 2021. Allan didn’t find the elusive money trail flowing from U.S. foundations to Canadian environmentalists, but he did have some harsh words for the CEC.
“It may well be that the reputation of this entity has been damaged beyond repair,” Allan wrote. The war room’s credibility has been “seriously compromised,” he added, noting that it “has come under almost universal criticism.”
While alluding to “growing pains,” Olsen told the Edmonton Journal that he was “disappointed” Allan didn’t reach out to hear about the CEC’s “increasingly effective advocacy campaigns.”
2. Tweetstorm Targetting the Times
Whoever runs the CEC Twitter account didn’t take kindly to a measured February 2020 New York Times piece highlighting a growing trend of major financial firms withdrawing their investments in Alberta’s tar sands.
The official CEC account went on a 23-tweet tear, accusing the Times of “countless” instances of antisemitism and “being routinely accused of bias.”
“So their track record is very dodgy. This is important to note as we look at this article. And we are building more information to put on our website,” the CEC account promised.
As a PressProgress article noted, these concerns didn’t stop the CEC from buying ads in the Times.
By the afternoon, the Twitter thread was deleted and Olsen tweeted out an apology from his personal account “for some of the tweets” the CEC posted. He didn’t specify which ones.
“The tone did not meet CEC's standard for public discourse,” Olsen wrote. “This issue has been dealt with internally.”
1. Going to War with a Children’s Cartoon About Bigfoot
The CEC made international news in March 2021 when it launched a mass email campaign against Bigfoot Family, a Netflix kids’ movie.
In the film, Bigfoot goes missing while protecting a wildlife reserve in Alaska—not Alberta—leading his family and other furry friends to rescue him from an oil company intent on dropping bombs on the reserve to access the oil underneath.
According to the CEC, the plot of this fictional film amounted to “misinformation,”which “villainizes energy workers and disparages the industry’s record on and commitment to environmental protection.”
Never mind that a U.S. oil company actually approved a project in the 1950s, dubbed “Project Cauldron,” to detonate a nuclear bomb near Fort McMurray to release oil from underground bitumen, which you can read about on the Government of Alberta website.
The CEC’s prewritten email urged Netflix to use its “powerful platform to tell the true story of Canada’s peerless oil and gas industry and not contribute to misinformation targeting your youngest, most vulnerable and impressionable viewers.”
“Brainwashing our kids with anti-oil and gas propaganda is just wrong – and Netflix needs to know that!” the letter added.
Olsen defended this campaign as being part of the CEC’s “important work.” Not to be outdone, Kenney called the cartoon “vicious” and defamatory.
This story has been updated to reflect the fact that Tom Olsen is a failed UCP, not PC, candidate.
Did I miss your favourite war room memory?
Don’t be a scab, kids.
I forgot about the logo twice-stolen. Amazing