LYTLE: Shining the light on Ottawa's 'cockroach' laws

I have, by nature and experience, a defensive-minded worldview. As a kid, in soccer and rugby, I was a fullback. In hockey I was a defenseman. In basketball I was a guard. My ineptitude in scoring goals, tries or baskets certainly contributed to being relegated to the back courts of the sports world, but I think it is a state of mind as well. So, what follows is against the grain for me.The much-maligned Bill C-59 recently received Royal Assent and so is now the law of the land. Among its catch-all provisions is a requirement that corporations (read energy sector corporations) justify their environmental claims, and rid the world of hyperbolic lies related to “greenwashing” of corporate performance. This is from a government that was going to plant 2 billion trees. Irony, thy name is Trudeau.The bill is, correctly in my view, seen as an intrusion on the free speech provisions of the Charter and therefore open to legal challenge on constitutional grounds. But public companies don’t trust the Supreme Court to uphold the provisions of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms given the abysmal performance of the court over the past four years related to Covid legislation. So, these companies scrub their websites of any potentially “targetable” environmental statements.I am not against companies scrubbing their websites because I found most of what they had to say irrelevant and mildly off-putting in any event. To take a page from former president Barack Obama, a simple statement of “We don’t do stupid sh#t” would have met the need rather nicely in my view. Instead we get pictures of young girls nurturing plants in the open air while wearing safety vests, hard hats, safety boots, and safety goggles. How inane! I mean where is the hearing protection!? Scrubbing this nonsense is a net gain.But the legislation opens the door to any crank with a few bucks and access to a US foundation that wants to destroy Canadian energy production. They need simply complain about “false greenwashing” and suddenly the shareholders are on the hook for a very expensive legal battle that will never end. Nobody wants to be on the receiving end of that. And I don’t think a court challenge or invocation of the Sovereignty Act will do the trick. There is another way.I once spoke to a meeting of Canadian resource companies in Peru that was convened to hear the story of how we resolved the kidnapping of our field crew of six geologists for non-existent “environmental sins.” (Oddly, along the way, a policeman was also kidnapped.) We had used some novel practices to find out who the kidnappers were and where they were getting their funding from. Other companies were curious, too. It turned out that a Spanish mining company coveted our concession and hired 150 nearby villagers to “kidnap” our team and scare us out of Peru. In a way, it was flatteringBut the point of this story is to tell another better one. One of the other companies at the meeting was being threatened by a very powerful drug cartel that used gold mines as money laundering operations and the narcos had set their sights on the assets of this Canadian company. The company president regularly received death threats and the company was perpetually in the Peruvian court system to overturn the corrupt judicial rulings. The consultant who had advised my company, upon hearing the story, remarked,“Your problem is easy to solve.”Even I was surprised by his statement.“Cockroaches hate the light so get someone to expose in print what they are doing, and they will leave you alone.”He helped the other company find a journalist who was as brave as their president and the sunshine flooded into the world of the drug cartel. Six months later the issue was amicably resolved in court. Cockroaches don’t like the light. An interesting turn of phrase.So, what would happen if the Alberta government passed legislation that allowed Canadian companies to civilly sue NGOs and their US enablers in an Alberta court for damages resulting from their lawfare? What if the individuals working for the NGOs and US enablers could be named in the legal suits? What if damages started at $5 million? What if the Alberta government could join the legal suit claiming lost royalty revenue and social services costs to deal with the fall out of companies moving from the province? Let’s take it further… What if the Alberta government passed legislation which states that NGOs and others must account for the veracity of every environmental statement on their websites and other public facing information or face punitive fines and other punishments? Can anyone prove that CO2 causes warming of the atmosphere? The scientific papers that I have read suggest that they have causality exactly backwards — it is warm temperatures which cause a rise in CO2. Should this “lie” be allowed to go unpunished? I am just spitballing here and maybe all this would be unconstitutional. I am not a lawyer. But then, who cares? Does Mr. Trudeau care that much of his legislation is unconstitutional? Of course not. Throw it out there and see what the Supreme Court has to say — in five to ten years. That is how the system works.What if a government on the offensive shone disinfectant sunshine on those who engage in lawfare? Would the cockroaches run for the baseboards? Corporate CEOs, I like what you are doing to your websites, but in the larger battle it is time for an offensive push against this nonsense. Talk to your premier. Madam Premier, it is time to start thinking outside the box. Murray Lytle P.Eng is a former Commissioner of the National Energy Board.

LYTLE: Shining the light on Ottawa's 'cockroach' laws

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