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Fraser Institute

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see below on Koch tar sands

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The Fraser Institute is a libertarian think tank based in Vancouver, British Columbia.

History

In 1974, a group of academics and business executives, concerned about big government, founded the Fraser Institute.[1]

At the time, there were concerns about the institute's agenda given that one of those who helped set it up, Michael Walker, an economist from the University of Western Ontario, had received financial support from the forestry giant, MacMillan-Bloedel. To allay these charges, the Fraser Institute stated that its research priorities would not be determined by its funders but by its staff, that the staff of the institute would not engage in political activity, not its funders, and that its conclusions would not be shaped to favour any political or economic group.[1].

In his book Thinking the unthinkable, Richard Cockett outlined that Antony Fisher, who founded the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) played a critical role in the development of the Fraser Institute. "On the strength of his reputation with the IEA, he was invited in 1975 to become co-director of the Fraser Institute in Vancouver, founded by the Canadian businessman Pat Boyle in 1974. Fisher let the young director of the Fraser Institute, Dr Michael Walker, get on with the intellectual output of the Institute (just as he had given free reign to Seldon and Harris at the IEA) while he himself concentrated on the fund-raising side," Cockett wrote.[2]

On page 2 of its 2005 Annual Report, the Fraser Institute features a photograph of Michael Walker with US Vice President Dick Cheney at the Eisenhower Administration Building, followed by a photograph of Canada's "future Prime Minister" Stephen Harper attending the Institute's annual general meeting.

The Fraser Institute's list of Senior Fellows includes **Tom Flanagan**, originally of Ottawa (Illinois), who is a professor of political science at the University of Calgary. Tom Flanagan was campaign manager to Prime Minister Stephen Harper when he headed Canada's newly formed Conservative Party in federal elections in 2004, and then again in 2005, when the Conservatives won a minority in government.[citation needed] 

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Other senior fellows of the institute have been deeply involved in political activity. Preston Manning is the founder of the right-wing Reform Party in Canada, which later merged with the Progressive Conservative Party to form the new Conservative Party, led by Stephen Harper who became Prime Minister in 2006. Former Conservative Premier of the province of Ontario, Mike Harris, is also a fellow at the Fraser Institute.[1].

There are also questions about how much the institute's work is shaped by its corporate funders. In 1999, the Fraser Institute sponsored two conferences on the tobacco industry: "Junk Science, Junk Policy? Managing Risk and Regulation" and "Should government butt out? The pros and cons of tobacco regulation."[1].

More recently, the Fraser Institute has led the campaign to deny the science behind and the dangers of climate change, with several of its fellows and authors signing letters to political leaders and writing Op Eds to that effect. ExxonMobil donates to the Fraser Institute for "climate change" work. Professor [[Ross McKitrick,author of the popular book that denies climate change Taken By Storm and known for his opposition to the Endangered Species Act in Canada, is also a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute.

Funding

An article by Donald Gutstein of Simon Fraser University examines recent rises in funding for the Fraser Institute. [1]

The Fraser Institute has sought and received funding from several tobacco companies, including Rothmans, British American Tobacco and Philip Morris, according to a 2000 letter found in the tobacco industry documents.[2]

In 2003 Fraser Institute income was $6,620,038. In its annual report it discloses that 52% was from unspecified foundations, 38% from unspecified "organizations" (presumably corporations) and only 10% from individuals.

"During the year, the Institute approached prospective donors to support over 50 specific projects including student seminars, teachers’ workshops, the elementary and secondary school report cards, environmental studies, aboriginal studies, globalization studies, global warming and the Kyoto Protocol, fiscal studies, economic freedom, managing risk and regulation, pharmaceutical and health care studies, CANSTATS, and democratic reform," it states in its 2003 annual report. [3]

While ExxonMobil discloses in it annual statements that it contributed $60,000 to the organisation to work on "Climate Change", the Fraser Institute does not explicitly disclose the contribution. [4]

According to Media Transparency between 1985 and 2003 the Fraser Institute has received 30 grants totalling $ 403,301 (unindexed for inflation) from the following U.S. foundations:

Climate change

The Fraser Institute has published material skeptical of climate change science since at least 2001, which marks the publication of Global Warming: A Guide to the Science by Willie Soon and Sallie L. Baliunas The abstract states: "There is no clear evidence, nor unique attribution, of the global effects of anthropogenic CO2 on climate."

Kenneth Green held the positions of Chief Scientist and Director of Centre for Studies in Risk, Regulation, and Environment at the Fraser Institute from 2002 to 2005. While at the Institute, Kenneth Green published many anti-Kyoto and climate change skeptical articles, notably the "Science Isn't Settled: The limitations of climate change models", together with Tim Balland Steven Schroeder.

As reported in the Vancouver Sun [6]: "The Fraser Institute received $120,000 US from ExxonMobil in 2003-'04, according to the company's annual report. [Fraser Institute President Michael] Walker said the funding paid for the work of researcher Ken Green."

The Fraser Institute published a so-called**Independent**Summary for Policymakers (ISPM) on Feb. 5, 2007, just after the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Summary for Policy Makers (part of the Fourth Assesment Report on Climate Change). Economist and Fraser Institute Senior Fellow Ross McKitrick served as co-ordinator of the ISPM [7]. Desmogblog leaked a late draft of the Fraser Institute ISPM in the runup to the IPCC official release [8].

Fellows and Staff

Senior Fellows

The following were Senior Fellows as of June, 2007: [9]

Senior Research Staff

Senior Administrative Staff

Editorial Advisory Board

Resources

Contact information

4th Floor, 1770 Burrard Street

Vancouver BC Canada V6J 3G7

Tel: (604) 688-0221

Fax: (604) 688-8539

web site: http://www.fraserinstitute.ca

Articles and resources

Related SourceWatch articles

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 "The Fraser Institute at 30", CBC News Online, October 12, 2004.
  2. ↑ Richard Cockett,Thinking the unthinkable: think-tanks and the economic counter-revolution, 1931-1983, Fontana Press, 1995.

External resources

External articles

Search the British American Tobacco Documents Library for more information on "Fraser Institute"

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74 pp agw report

GlobalWarmingAGuidetotheScience

ggl news 10 24

GlobeNewswire

Fraser Institute News Release: Reforming Canada’s business

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Oct. 10, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Canada has an opportunity to change the way it taxes businesses and in doing...

.14 hours ago

Fraser Institute

Canadians want major health-care reform now: op-ed

Tragic stories of multiyear waits for patients are now a Canadian news staple. Is it any wonder, therefore, that a new Navigator poll found...

.1 day ago

Fraser Institute

Boosting Canada's Competitiveness by Reforming Business Taxation

Canada has an opportunity to change the way it taxes businesses and in doing so, could vastly improve the country's attractiveness for...

.15 hours ago

Fraser Institute

Canadians think Canada is ‘broken’ amid gloomy economic numbers: op-ed

Canada has fallen further behind the best-performing economies on productivity, per-person income and real wages.

.14 hours ago

Fraser Institute

BLOG: Cost of Ottawa’s gun ban fiasco may reach $6 billion

The federal government has not revealed how it will collect the newly-banned firearms.

.3 days ago

Fraser Institute

Our Incomes Are Falling Behind: Earnings in the Canadian Provinces and US States, 2010–2022

Canadians are concerned about their income and their ability to purchase essential goods and services. Real (that is, inflation-adjusted)...

.1 week ago

Fraser Institute

Numbers don’t lie—crime up significantly in Toronto and across Canada : op-ed

It's no secret that politicians often cherry-pick statistics instead of telling the full story when the full story doesn't look great for...

.1 day ago

Fraser Institute

Median wages and salaries lower in every Canadian province than in every U.S. state: op-ed

This growing divergence in employment earnings has significant ramifications for the Canadian economy.

.1 week ago

Fraser Institute

Federal government should listen to Canadians and trim the bureaucracy: op-ed

From 2015 to March 2024, the number of federal employees grew from 257034 to 367772.

.1 week ago

Fraser Institute

Federal government’s environmental policies will do more harm than good: op-ed

Electric vehicles often emit more particulate pollution than conventional vehicles.

.2 weeks ago

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https://www.thecanadafiles.com/articles/cedh

aug 2020

Morgana Adby

The:{ Fraser Institute :(style="overflow-wrap:break-word;text-decoration-line:underline"):}:has long been the boogeyman of the progressive ethos. A lobbying think tank with charitable status, it does everything progressives are ill-equipped to respond to. 

Along with standard libertarian media,the institute also participates in research. The issue being, that often this research has a partisan slant that goes unacknowledged upon replication. There are a few ways to keep this under the radar of journalists and citizens alike.

Among the allegations of misleading information, these stand out:

From conflating two indifferent Y-axis on the same graph to selecting an artificially high average income to conduct studies- the Fraser Institute has tried it.

Maybe that’s why their funder of choice is the :{Koch Foundation}:, according to the spreadsheets provided by Desmog. It was also confirmed by a:{ co-founder}: of the Institute when this information was made public.

The Koch’s are best known for being the billionaires that reshaped the American Overton window. Their business model is essentially to reinvest profits into propagandizing for deregulation, which in turn creates more profits. This has had a long term impact. Some have even claimed the Koch empire :{hijacked American Democracy:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word;text-decoration-line:underline"):}:, to prioritize their 'libertarian' agenda.

Unsurprisingly, the Kochs have their fingers in many Canadian pies, not limited to think tanks. After all, what would be the point of promoting free markets that they would have no use for?

In 2019, Koch Industries got out of their :{leases in Alberta’s oil sands:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word;text-decoration-line:underline"):}:. Beforehand, they were one of the largest landholders in the region. Koch’s empire is what it is because of :{natural Canadian resources:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word;text-decoration-line:underline"):}:. 

This money goes towards the larger Koch political project in the US and to a lesser degree Canada. In practice, the funding of hundreds of organizations, just like the Fraser Institute. Any think tank that is a member of the :{Atlas Network}: is funded by the Koch’s among other giants. On that list of members is the :{Macdonald Laurier Institute}:. 

It is practically common knowledge that the :{Koch Foundation routinely funds conservative media.:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word;text-decoration-line:underline"):}: What may surprise you is that one of these organizations has become somewhat of a household name.

Rebel News, in many ways a reincarnation of Sun News that had evolved with the Conservative Party. ​It has gotten more extreme with time, despite the firing of open White Nationalists like Faith Goldy. By more extreme, I do not just mean in rhetoric. Today, I am comfortable condemning Rebel News as an organization deeply steeped in White Nationalist violence.

In many ways, Rebel News is and always has been a safe space for Ezra Levant to fully explore his identity. The only problem is, Ezra Levant’s identity is one that encourages stochastic terror, deeply tied to the rallying cry of :{Gavin McInnes:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word;text-decoration-line:underline"):}:.

As the Proud Boys stopped being a cute internet meme, Rebel News was happy to cheer them on- or more often than not, scare them into continuing down the radicalization rabbit hole. 

Regarding media influence in the mainstream, some have gone as far as to allege that ‘western alienation’ has been :{weaponized:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word;text-decoration-line:underline"):}: by the wider Koch influence on media and policy to reproduce division. 

Although the specifics are blurry, there are many anecdotes of CBC, Global News and reputable reporters using the stats coming out of think tanks. Likewise, the extremism that is promoted by Koch funded right-wing media has a direct effect on the media world at large.

When more people see the world from Rebel News’ lens that is essentially the creation of a target audience, stimulating the whole white nationalism media economy. The impact of this population on mainstream media may be minimal, but still very concerning that it has gone largely unchecked.

All throughout the early 2000s, Koch’s influence in Alberta steadily increased and they :{maintained a solid lobbying presence. :(style="overflow-wrap:break-word;text-decoration-line:underline"):}: Likewise, at the national level, Koch Industries spent about:{ 79 million in federal lobbying}: between 1998 and 2008.

What Now?

A challenge for all people that cover Koch Industries is that they are notoriously tight-lipped. The private organization will likely remain as such, and because of that their line by line funding is a mystery.

A starting point is to be aware of the influence, but until the firm is forced into a higher standard of transparency, it is difficult to know just how much our public life is the design of oil sand billionaires

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http://www.nationalobserver.com/2015/05/04/news/how-canada-made-koch-brothers-rich

Author's note: Until this past February, I worked as a contracted television producer for Global TV and its current affairs program,16x9. Last fall, I was commissioned to do a story for the program about the Koch brothers, their holdings in Alberta’s oil sands and their interest in getting the Keystone XL pipeline built. In January, two days before the 22-minute documentary was about to air on 16x9, Global's senior management pulled the story. After Jesse Brown's Canadaland published a story aboutits sudden disappearance, Global fired me, although I was not quoted in that story or had any involvement with it. What you're about to read includes some of the material that has not yet been permitted to be shown on Global.

The attacks were nasty.

In the winter of 2011, Karen Kleiss, a reporter with theEdmonton Journal, wrote a story about how Koch Industries Inc. had hired a lobbyist in Alberta. The story provided background on the Wichita, Kansas-based energy conglomerate, its presence in Alberta, and its American billionaire owners, Charles and David Koch.

Kleiss reported at the time that no one from Koch Industries addressed her questions. Nevertheless, after her story appeared, Koch Industries went on the offensive. On their website, kochfacts.com – and in vivid red type – they lashed out at Kleiss’s article, claiming it was “slanted,” that it “parroted partisan political rhetoric and other distortions” and that its coverage of the Koch brothers registering a lobbyist in Alberta was a “purported story.” The Koch Industries representative summed up by saying:

“There is a place for opinion on the op-ed pages, on blogs, and on Twitter. It does not belong on the news pages of an objective journal.”

What the paragraph-by-paragraph rebuttal did not dispute was Kleiss's assertion that Koch industries is “an American energy conglomerate owned by two powerful billionaire brothers who help fund the Tea Party and climate change denial movements in the U.S.”

The attack was so strong that Lucinda Chodan, editor-in-chief of the Journal at the time, felt compelled to write a lengthy response to Koch defending her reporter’s work. The company replied by taking further potshots at the newspaper and at Kleiss’s judgment.

Around the same time, a similar scenario was playing out after Reuters ran a story entitled “Koch Brothers Positioned To Be Big Winners If Keystone XL Pipeline Is Approved,” that also detailed Koch’s holdings in Canada. It discussed how the Koch brothers would benefit if the Keystone XL pipeline was built.

Written by David Sassoon, a journalist who runs InsideClimate News— a Brooklyn, NY-based, Pulitzer prize-winning website that covers climate change issues— the Reuters piece eventually elicited a ferocious response from Koch’s PR department. The company accused Sassoon of publishing “falsehoods” and of being an “environmental activist,” and Reuters of printing “advocacy journalism.”

Koch Industries even took out ads via Facebook and Google with a photo of Sassoon under the headline “David Sassoon’s Deceptions.”

Once again, a Reuters editor had to intervene with a lengthy letter to Koch defending their use of Sassoon’s reporting. These attacks went on for some months. Today, Kleiss and Sassoon refuse to discuss these events.

But at that time Koch Industries’ campaigns against the media were not unusual. Their website, KochFacts, criticized reporting in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Mother Jones, Forbes.com,The Washington Post and Bloomberg's Markets Magazine.

By 2011, the Koch brothers – currently the sixth richest people in the world, with US$42.3-billion apiece – were attracting attention because of their efforts at influencing the US political system, helping foster the Tea Party movement, and attacking attempts to curb climate change. They were also emerging as political kingmakers: two weeks ago, the brothers were in the news for endorsing Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, as their choice for the Republican presidential nominee (Walker is well-known for his attacks on labour rights in his state).

Koch Industries, the second-largest private company in the US, has become infamous for playing hardball....eenpeace’s most recent research shows that since 1997, the Kochs have spent a total of US$79-million to groups that deny climate change science.

Some of that cash has come north to Canada – specifically to theFraser Institute. Asfirst revealed by the Vancouver Observer, tax records show that since 2007, the Fraser Institute, one of Canada’s oldest conservative think tanks, has pocketed a total of US$765,000 from one of Charles Kochs’ foundations.

“Multiple generations of Fraser Institute staffers and donors and board members have had links to the federal Conservative Party,” says Rick Smith, executive director of the Broadbent Institute, a liberal think tank. “There’s no doubt that the Fraser Institute’s aggressive denial of climate change, you can see resonating in Harper government policy.”

Given that the Kochs’ companies generate huge quantities of greenhouse gases, this expenditure is no surprise. But it also has a direct bearing on their plans for the oil sands.

For instance, the Kochs’ Dunkirk project will be using in situ technology – whereby the bitumen is steamed out of the ground. Yet Erin Flanagan, an oil sands analyst with the Pembina Institute, says “when you compare in situ drilling and open pit mining, in situ is actually 2.5 times more greenhouse-gas damaging per barrel than a barrel through mining.”

And then there is the Keystone XL pipeline, which would connect the oil sands to the Gulf of Mexico. Koch Industries claims they have no financial stake in, or party to the design and construction of Keystone – even producing a YouTube video to this effect. And it’s true the company has booked no capacity on the pipeline, should it ever be built.

These denials ring a little hollow to some: after all, the tar sands are the world’s third largest source of oil and the Kochs control at least 1.1 million acres of it. “The Koch brothers are very interested in the Keystone XL pipeline going through,” insists Mike Casey of NextGen Climate. “They'll tell you that they're not, but the reality is that they understand that it’s a key piece of enabling infrastructure for tar sands development. Without a major pipeline, the tar sands do not get developed.”

Indeed, the oil industry is desperate to build pipelines for two reasons: cost and capacity. “Pipelines are going to replace rail over the long term and will be a cheaper option for these (oil sands) projects,” explains Sam La Bell, an oil analyst with Veritas Investment Research, a Bay Street equity research firm. “From that point of view, it will probably cost you from $8 to $12 a barrel on a pipeline, whereas you will pay up to $20 a barrel for rail. It’s the cheaper option.”

In fact, the financial industry has pointed to the cost difference as being critical. In a 2013 Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) report on Keystone, they said if it does not go ahead “oil sands projects slated for start-up in the 2014-16 timeframe are likely to proceed at a much slower pace or be deferred.” A Goldman Sachs report the same year said if Keystone was not approved, supply to the U.S. of oil sands fuel begins to level off.

Moreover, transporting bitumen by rail has its limits. “With rail capacity, we will be at capacity by 2017 and 2018,” says La Bell. “So, in other words, all of the takeaway capacity – rail and pipelines – would be used up by that point. Beyond 2017 we need longer term options to pan out” – in other words, pipelines like Keystone.

In short, Koch will be hampered in exploiting their oil sands holdings if Keystone and other pipelines are not approved. As Casey says: “They're not holding 1.1 million acres of tar sands for conservation purposes.”

Which is one reason the Kochs have perhaps invested so heavily in backing the pro-Keystone Republican Party.

In 2012, for example, Koch-affiliated organizations raised US$404-million during the US election cycle. This past US midterm, they spent US$290-million to help Republicans win control of the Senate. The Republicans’ first order of business was to introduce a bill in the Senate on Keystone, which was passed in January (Obama vetoed it).

This winter, it was revealed that the Kochs and their billionaire friends plan to spent US$889-million on the 2016 election cycle – or more than double what the Republican National Committee spent in 2012.

“I think they are doubling down on their efforts to change the balance of power in the U.S.,” says Schulman. “They are funding really their own political party.”

The National Observer contacted a Koch Industries spokesperson multiple times for comment on the issues raises in this article. The company did not respond.

Meanwhile, as the Koch brothers continue to make headlines over their political ambitions, the evidence suggests that behind their veil of secrecy lies a plan to continue profiting from Canada’s oil.

As Mike Casey says: “These are business people and they invest politically to advance a business agenda and financial agenda, and they're not in the tar sands because they like the look of the landscape.”

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The Fraser Institute

Western University

Western University

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About

Michael Walker is a Senior Fellow and Honorary Director of The Fraser Institute and Chairman of the Fraser Institute Foundation. From its inception in 1974, until September 2005, Michael Walker directed the research activities of the Fraser Institute and was its Chief Executive Officer. Before that he taught at Western University and Carleton University and was employed at the Bank of Canada and the Federal Department of Finance. He received his Ph.D in Econometrics at the University of Western Ontario and has been awarded Honorary LLD and DSS degrees.

As an economist, he has authored or edited 45 books and written thousands of articles on popular and technical economic issues. His goal as a Founder of the Fraser Institute has been to discover policies that enhance human development. He has provided policy advice in this pursuit on 6 continents.

He is the co-founder, with Milton and Rose D. Friedman, of the Economic Freedom of the World project which is now a collaboration of institutes in 85 countries and produces the annual Economic Freedom of the World Index.

He is a director of a number of firms and other enterprises, including: The Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation, The Canadian Constitution Foundation, North Point School and the owner of the Walker Group of Companies. He was a founding Director of Sydney Research – a pioneer Canadian software company, an owner-Director of Mackenzie Fiemann Chemicals Ltd., a Director of Canaccord Financial, Loram Group of companies, Loram Maintenance of Way (US), Mancal Corporation, Collingwood School and the Max Bell Foundation. He is past-Chairman of The Pacific Academy for Advanced Studies which hosts the annual meeting in Alamos, Mexico of the “Chicago Boys” instrumental in the economic reform process in Latin America and elsewhere.

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He has two children and three grandchildren. Hobbies include windsurfing and tennis and he is a licensed pilot of airplanes and seaplanes..

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Experience

The Fraser Institute

Senior Fellow

The Fraser Institute

Bank of Canada

Head Monetary Policy and Special Studies Group

Bank of Canada

1969 - 19734 years

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Ottawa

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Education

Western UniversityWestern University

Western University

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)Econometrics and Quantitative Economics

1967 - 1969

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Activities and Societies: Teaching Assistant Monetary Economics Night Course

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Western UniversityWestern University

Western University

Master’s DegreeEconometrics and Quantitative Economics

1966 - 1967

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St. Francis Xavier UniversitySt. Francis Xavier University

St. Francis Xavier University

Bachelor’s DegreeEconomicsSumma Cum Laude

Activities and Societies: JV football VP Debating Society Finance Minister Model Parliament

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View Michael’s full profile

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