Federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh slammed the federal Conservatives on Wednesday for spreading falsehoods that left his party's natural resources critic facing death threats and homophobic slurs.
Earlier this week, Canada's National Observer reported that NDP MP Charlie Angus had been "inundated" by calls from people — mostly men — threatening and insulting him for tabling a bill to rein in misleading advertising by the fossil fuel industry. If successful, Bill C-372 would prohibit oil and gas companies from marketing their products as a solution to climate change.
The federal Conservatives have attacked the proposal, launching an online petition claiming the bill would "prescribe jail time for Canadians who speak positively about the oil and gas industry in Canada." This is false. The proposed law targets companies, not individuals, and wouldn't send anyone to jail.
"This bill is about making sure misinformation, false information cannot be spread," said Singh. "The fact that Conservatives are opposed to the idea of not letting corporations lie … and [that] they would resort to cheering on attacks of a very personal nature, death threats, inappropriate things like that, shows you who the Conservatives are."
"The casual disregard of facts and science in pursuit of partisan advantage goes beyond the climate change issue: it also becomes an issue for the health of our democracy," said federal environment minister Steven Guilebault in a statement. "We know that a large majority of Canadians want more action on the environment, but a noisy minority of climate skeptics unfortunately dominate the online public discourse."
Experts agree that burning fossil fuels is the main driver of climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that misinformation and greenwashing are "barriers" to tackling the climate crisis by slowing down vital policies.
Other countries have already regulated fossil fuel advertising to minimize greenwashing. France, for instance, banned the practice in 2022 and requires high-carbon industries to carry warnings about their climate impacts. Modelled on 1997 laws regulating tobacco ads in Canada, Bill C-372 aims to help Canada catch up with its global peers on the issue.
Angus said opposition from the Conservatives, their supporters and the fossil fuel industry has been vociferous and swift. In addition to the petition and "rage farm" of angry men personally attacking him and his staff, he has also received more conventional "blowback" from industry supporters.
Still, the most aggressive attacks have come from those enraged about the false prospect that their freedom to support oil and gas could be curtailed. This window into "petro-masculinity" — a culture where masculinity is defined by aggressive behaviour, right-wing extremism and climate denial — has made meaningful debate impossible, Angus said.
"We used to debate issues. People would phone me and say, ‘I really think that bill is really stupid.’ And I'd explain it to them and that's a good conversation," said Angus. "But when people are phoning me saying: 'You m*fo, you're never going to jail me. I'm going to die with my oil and gas bumper stickers in my cold dead hand.' How do you converse with people?"
- Marc Fawcett-Atkinson
- Journalist
- Rochelle Baker
- Journalist
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"Rage farming" is one of the
"Rage farming" is one of the more accurate terms for Conservative's policy and idea-free modus operendi.
The NDP is showing that it actually has a strong spine by shooting back with truthful responses and not ducking.
Jagmeet Singh and Charlie Angus, keep up your good work!
Many or most Canadians can
Many or most Canadians can see that our world is rapidly being ruined and would like the Government to do something about it. A strong government is the only one capable of imposing strong measures, and the only way to have a strong government is if the NDP (and the parti Québecois) join their effort with the Liberals. As long as we have a fractioned House, the big companies will always succeed in preventing change and preserving their profits.
I dunno. Do you really think
I dunno. Do you really think Trudeau is a climate-positive influence?
It seems to me that someone who pushes pipelines and insists that CCUS and blue hydrogen (from gas and oil wells) is somehow a way to get to zero emissions. He needs to be reined in by international law that doesn't yet exist. The NDP, the Bloc, and the Greens all together, don't have nearly the number of seats required to force Liberals to comply. Unless the Liberals are in a minority, and need their votes to do anything at all. As it stands, the Liberals and the Conservatives are both pro-oil-and-gas.
Koch Industries made a large
Koch Industries made a large percentage of their wealth from Alberta bitumen refining in Minnesota. Over the years they have used their wealth to spread disinformation and hate to promote their interests probably more than any other entity. Both these statements are facts that everyone should know. To assume that this manipulation hasn't happened with Canadian politics where they make most of their money is naive. I'm not even discussing the record for spewing disinformation from the rest of the fossil fuel industry working in Canada.
Everyone was worried about China influencing Canadian politics while completely ignoring the real elephant in the room.
Indeed.
Indeed.
Koch Industries mined and extracted bitumen and left a huge mess behind. They piped the raw dilbit to their US refineries and created American jobs cooking the toxic goo and rendering it into synthetic crude, then cooked it again to make high value products like gasoline and diesel fuel. They banked the huge price differential between the raw feedstock and finished products and kept the economic benefits outside of Canada, raw resource mining excepted.
When the world price of oil collapsed in 2014 the Alberta government panicked and issued statements begging and pleading for help and demonstrating the depths of its economic insecurity with bullying reactions against the criticisms, mainly focused on its lack of a stabilizing sales tax after decades of stupidly subsidizing its annual budgets with royalties from a finite resource. But you never heard the oil companies that owned refineries complaining. They loved their even cheaper feedstock that saw the price spread between raw resource and finished product increase.
This has been the Canadian way since the HBC and beaver pelts and eastern Maritime timber became a thing 400 years ago. Alberta has been especially good at continuind this ancient detrimental practice, kowtowing to foreign economic interests. The only possible result from this habitually weak shortsightedness is saddling the people and their governments with the costs of cleaning up the mess foreign companies leave behind after decades of exploitation and profit taking.
One can only hope any effort made to expand renewables in Canada will be a full partner to efforts to make products in Canada, such as green steel.
But a government that virtually bans its own highly successful renewables industry solely to protect its fossil donor benefactors is merely doubling down on its own stupidity while placing the people's future well being on the alter.
The growing incidence of
The growing incidence of respiratory illness among north Americans is almost entirely due to decades of fossil fuel air pollution. It first appeared among colliers as black lung, then cigarettes obscured the particulate damage, Now better diagnostic tools can differentiate between the causes. How many Canadian children are using puffers to battle asthma? How many people who have never smoked are suffering from COPD? or chronic pneumonia?.
When the jackasses making death threats have to cope with their own cancers, etc. it is possible the health system will be so overwhelmed they won't get the care they need. Tsk.
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