Knox — Big Oil’s Rottweilers vs. barking beagles

Jack Knox writes for the Victoria Times-Colonist.

COLUMN — News item: A U.S. judge has awarded Sue Ann Hamm $1 billion in her divorce settlement with an Oklahoma oil tycoon. She is appealing.

Appealing? With a billion bucks in her pocket, she’s freaking gorgeous.

Apologies. That should be “fracking” gorgeous, since that’s how ex-hubby Harold Hamm made much of his fortune. He pioneered the technique while building a petro-fortune estimated at $20 billion.

For those who think $20 billion is a lot of money for one person, it should be noted that our pal Hal is not even the wealthiest oil billionaire in the United States. That honour goes to the Koch brothers, whom Forbes magazine estimated were worth $40.6 billion apiece this year.

Which leads to the question: Does Big Oil really need Canadian taxpayers’ help in hounding environmentalists?

Which is what came to mind while watching rain-soaked Mounties haul sodden anti-pipeline protesters off Burnaby Mountain last week.

Now, most protest camps end up being counterproductive. Inevitably, they steal the spotlight from the actual issue — poverty, uranium mining, whatever — as the mob gets peppered with tinfoil-hatted crackpots, would-be martyrs and dogma-spouting ideologues so self-righteous that they make even the most mild-mannered observer feel like clubbing a baby seal to death, just out of spite. The focus shifts from “Do the economic benefits justify the risk of a devastating bitumen spill on our coast?” to “Should the hippie get a job?” (Answer: Yes, preferably one in a bongo-free workplace.)

But jeezly weezly, it’s hard to ignore the imbalance between the cold, miserable, smells-like-a-wet-dog dampness of the Burnaby protest, where scores have offered themselves up for arrest, and the comfortable world where $1-billion divorce settlements are scorned as pocket change.

Ottawa doesn’t see it that way. The Conservative government has spent a couple of years demonizing Canadian environmental groups that take funds from what is characterized as a well-heeled foreign eco-elite. In 2012, Stephen Harper complained about opponents using “foreign money” to hijack the public hearings into the Northern Gateway proposal while then-environment minister Peter Kent accused enviros of “laundering” offshore cash to bog down the regulatory process. (They had no quibble with Northern Gateway’s foreign investors, who apparently used only Canadian Tire currency.)

That year, when the Conservatives put $8 million in the federal budget to set up a team of auditors to crack down on non-profits whose work was deemed too political for their tax status, it was broadly seen as an attempt to stifle foes of the Conservatives’ plans.

Sure enough, The Canadian Press reported this summer that at least half of the 10 charities audited in 2012-13 turned out to be environmental groups opposed to the government’s energy policies. Funny that of the more than 85,000 charities in Canada, the Tax Police just happened to go after the ones Harper had struck from his Christmas card list. (Must be one of those wacky coincidences, like the time you ran into your neighbour in Puerto Vallarta.)

The audit budget has since topped $13 million, the target list expanding to charities dealing with poverty, international aid and the like. Non-profits say the fight is bleeding them dry.

Forget, for a moment, the inequities of a system that threatens the tax advantages of charities that are deemed too politically active, yet grants even bigger tax breaks to donors who give to political parties themselves.

Focus instead on the disparity in resources available to the two sides of the oil tanker debate. Environmental groups might be fuelled by foreign money, but it’s not Big Oil kind of money. When enviros divorce, they fight over the Westfalia, not the Rolls-Royce.

This isn’t really about pipelines or whether shipping oil by tankers is a good idea. You can argue that the economy needs them and that the risk-benefit analysis works. But there’s a difference between arguing your side and not allowing the other guy to argue his. It’s flat-out wrong when the government supplies the gag.

Pipeline proponents have enough of an edge without government intervention. When the dogfight is between a Rottweiler and a beagle, we don’t need to waste taxpayers’ money muzzling Snoopy.

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