Michelle Sterling of Friends of Science and Sheila Gunn-Reed critique the 2021 lawsuit by 15 Canadian youth (aged 10–19), backed by the David Suzuki Foundation and U.S. group Our Children’s Trust, accusing the government of violating their rights due to climate policies. Sterling dismisses climate concerns as a "first-world problem," ties activism to commercial interests like carbon trading, and highlights Alberta’s reliance on natural gas despite claims of 100% renewables. She condemns foreign-funded groups exploiting Indigenous issues and oil sector tensions, calling child-targeted scaremongering "criminal." The debate frames climate advocacy as emotionally driven and factually flawed, questioning its broader societal impact. [Automatically generated summary]
Federal Governments Sued Over Climate Change00:12:30
Hello, Rebels.
I'm Sheila Gunread, and you're listening to a free audio-only recording of my Wednesday night show, The Gun Show.
Tonight, my guest is Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science.
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What's the real story behind the kids who are suing the federal government because of climate change?
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
Itty bitty little human shields are suing the federal government in federal court.
Here's the headline from the CBC.
Actually, it's from the abhorrent CBC Kids website: 15 young Canadians suing the government over climate change.
Now, let's dig down deeper in this mildly exploitative article.
At the heart of the lawsuit is the idea that the government's role in the climate crisis violates their fundamental rights.
The youth ages 10 to 19 will attempt to argue in court that they suffered specific individualized injuries as a result of climate change, said Chris Tulufson, one of the lawyers representing the group.
The kids did this with the help of an organization based in the United States called Our Children's Trust, a foreign environmental charity that makes these sorts of lawsuits a habit of theirs all across the world.
Now, my guest tonight has examined the role of David Suzuki and other prominent Canadian environmentalists in this foreign-motivated, vexatious lawsuit.
Joining me tonight in an interview we recorded yesterday afternoon is my friend Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science.
Joining me now from her home in Calgary is Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science.
And the election was all anybody could talk about, but right in the middle of the last week of the election campaign was a visit from Greta Tunberg.
And we'll get to her in a minute.
But in the wake of the Greta Tunberg visit to Canada, there's a lawsuit from a group of children because, you know, that's what children do.
They just run to the law courts all the time.
And they want to sue governments for the effects of climate change.
Michelle, please explain this madness to me.
Well, I can't explain every detail of it, but it's very interesting to note that this is a co-plaintiff is David Suzuki Foundation.
And the constitutional aspect of the case is based on the fact that there's an inequity in the law in that they're children and they can't vote.
And also, when you look at the list of signatories, many of the people involved are, their parents are very strong climate activists in Calgary.
Of course, Dr. Joe Vipond and his daughter are named on that suit as plaintiffs.
And he brought us coal phase out and that has resulted in billions of dollars of costs to Albertons.
And now we get to have the federal government go to court and pay maybe millions of dollars more in this suit.
So these are expensive people.
And really, you know, when you look at the claims made by some of the children in the case, and I'm sure that they do feel these emotional aspects, but I think back to my mother growing up in the prairies and as a pioneer, you know, my grandfather was breaking land out by Hannah.
And her childhood was stolen because her mother died when she was about eight years old from complications after the birth of my mother's brother.
And why?
Because she had gone out to get the milk cow from going into the garden, which for a prairie farmer was a very important source of food.
And that caused her to hemorrhage.
So my mother had to leave home at age 13 and was shipped off to England all by herself on a boat to take care of her grandmother for the rest of her youth.
So, you know, when I read the stories these children are reciting as something critical to their health, I think, well, how did those earlier generations ever survive?
I don't think climate change is a big deal.
Yeah, you know, you put it in such a beautiful context there.
This is truly a first world problem.
And these are rich people's very privileged children.
These aren't, you know, struggling inner city kids who are dealing with real problems with inequity, real problems caused by poverty, by lack of jobs, by, you know, fathers not being in the home, like real problems that affect and hinder kids their opportunity for prosperity and growth for generations.
This is not what we're talking about.
These are some of the most influential people in the country.
They're very privileged kids who are just being human shields in the court of law for their parents' agendas.
And of course, David Suzuki's hands are right in the middle of it.
Right.
And the Suzuki Foundation, you know, it was interesting to see David Suzuki speaking to the crowd of children at the Vancouver climate strike and saying, you know, and here's Greta all by herself, you know, who only a year ago started this.
Well, you know, we now have a video out about the backers of the Greta Thunberg movement.
It's an organization out of Sweden.
We got their IPO, their prospectus, and they're selling basically social engineering, social media, and carbon offsets.
And they have a vast international network of people pushing this whole climate strike thing, Fridays for Future.
And that's why it spiraled so quickly.
It's not because Greta's an inspirational young woman.
It's because there's a huge network behind her.
And that network is pushing things like carbon offsets.
And so here's David Suzuki saying, well, you know, those greedy corporations are trying to take over the world and we want to stop them.
And Greta's a symbol of that.
Well, he's funded by Power Corporation and has been.
His, sorry, his foundation is funded by Power Corporation and has been since 2007.
I don't know for how much, but if you want to talk about big corporations, Power Corporation was in 2017 the 358th largest corporation in the world, according to Forbes.
And so, you know, what game is being played here?
These children are being gaslit for commercial interests in carbon offsets, carbon trading, and renewables.
Yeah, I've always gotten the sense that Greta was just a marketing campaign.
And really, that's what she is.
She's the marketing campaign, the TV commercial for this big carbon offset trading company.
And yet, the likes of David Suzuki, they're lecturing us about big oil.
Well, I'm more worried about big carbon offsets because I need oil to survive, but I certainly don't see the effects of paying for carbon offsets to satiate my first world guilt.
Right.
Well, you know, carbon trading markets are described by Mark Shapiro in the Harper's magazine of February 2010 as the lack of delivery of an invisible substance to know that's what you're paying for.
You know, so interestingly enough, in Calgary, Calgary is supposedly 100% renewable now.
So that means that we're paying for offsets.
And yet, Calgary has very significant financial problems right now.
Who are we enriching and why?
You know, that's a great point.
When these cities, again, pat themselves on the back and brag to the world that they have gone 100% renewable or all their buses are running on green energy, that's not the case.
The buses are not hooked up to the electrical grid.
They are taking taxpayer dollars and giving it to a carbon trading company just so that they can pretend that they have gone 100% renewable when really that's not the case.
Right.
And anyone can go on the Alberta Electric System Operator market demand and supply site any time of the day.
And I did that earlier this morning and I saw that we had about 5,000 megawatts being generated from natural gas, 2,000 or 3,000 from coal, 300 maybe from wind.
We were importing a fairly significant amount, I think 700 megawatts from 200 from BC Hydro and the rest from Montana coal.
So, you know, now we're sending money out of the province to buy power that we used to make ourselves here.
And, you know, we're certainly not running on wind or solar.
Yeah, I think a lot of people don't realize we have decided to abandon and we I don't mean you and I, I mean, the government collectively on our behalf has abandoned to, or has decided to abandon, about 800 years of some of the cleanest burning coal on the face of the earth in the interest of pretending to be green, so that we can then import coal fired electricity from Montana.
Yeah, or Saskatchewan, but today it wasn't Saskatchewan today, it was Montana.
Yeah, it's pretty depressing and really just a boondoggle on taxpayers and consumers and citizens and certainly these poor kids.
I mean, these kids, going back to this climate strike and such like, they're being scared to death.
And one of the things that we also found this week is there's a group called the 3% that has infiltrated almost every school in Canada.
And it's unbelievable.
They go in there, they scare the pants off the kids, they tell them to become activists, go, go, go.
That's probably part of the source of this child's lawsuit.
But there's this group called Our Time.
And just yesterday, they were thrown out of the House of Commons in Ottawa because they entered, I believe, as visitors and then began some kind of protest there.
3% Infiltrating Schools00:08:53
But they're being driven by this 3% organization, which of course is connected to climate reality.
And who is climate reality?
It's Al Gore.
And what has Al Gore done for Canada?
He's been cheerleading the blockadia of Kindermorgan, Trans Mountain Pipeline, and every other pipeline since we began trying to get them through.
So, like, what's the big deal here?
Why are we having our politicians welcoming Greta to Canada when she actually represents a group that's associated with Mr. Gore and his blockadia efforts in Canada?
You know, I was just thinking as you were talking about Al Gore, and I was thinking about the foreign money that flows into Canada in the lead-up to any election anywhere, really.
Does Friends of Science register as a third-party advertiser before you put up a billboard?
Do you guys have to do that?
Well, only during an election period.
Yeah, so Greta can come to the country and she's a marketing campaign for these carbon trading companies, and yet never, there's no cries about her having to register as a third-party advertiser or the people behind her having to register as a third-party advertiser when the money is coming from out of country.
And yet, somebody like Friends of Science, you folks have to register as a third-party advertiser to put up a billboard in your own country expressing a political opinion.
And nobody sees a problem with any of this.
Right.
Well, you know, with Greta, and again, I'm not denouncing the child, the young that she actually probably believes everything that she says and does.
But the movement behind her, you know, as we just did a video about it where we also show that one of the people on the board of the foundation associated with the We Don't Have Time movement is a Canadian, Kathy Orlando.
She's with Citizens Climate Lobby.
They've been one of the most effective lobbyists, according to their website, for carbon fee and dividend, you know, the carbon dividend, the rebate.
So, you know, that actually directly ties everything to Canada.
And in fact, you know, there's a new method of advertising in the digital world called native advertising, where basically it's a form of sort of placing an advertorial, you know, an editorial-like column that moves around through social media on different platforms so people are exposed to it in different ways.
And I would say that in a stroke of brilliance, Greta Thunberg is actually a walking native advertisement.
And just it's brilliant, but it's also frightening because, again, all these children are scared to death.
And why?
Because people want to get rich on carbon offsets.
Yeah, I mean, these people are getting rich while kids are getting anxiety disorders.
Now, speaking about lawfare and just to tie everything back to David Suzuki using children as a front for his lawsuit, you guys have actually two rebuttals and a video about 28 law professors who are demanding climate accountability laws and you called them ungrateful and I thought it was excellent.
Yeah, they are ungrateful.
Five of these law professors are from the University of Calgary, Canada's energy university.
And every university in Canada, I would say without exception, has been funded in some way, shape, or form by big oil, big gas, big mining.
But certainly Calgary's university has been funded a lot by big oil, small oil, supply chain to oil.
And what a bunch of ingrates, really.
They have no idea what energy delivers, conventional energy delivers to our world.
And they're proposing that cities could go out and just sue big oil and, you know, get some money because climate change, you know, we had a flood, so that's your fault, big oil.
Mind you, we used all the oil, but it's your fault for selling it to us.
So, you know, these are absurd notions and dangerous.
These are legally authorized companies.
They're providing an essential service.
This is why they're so highly regulated because, you know, you don't want big oil to one day say, well, you know what, we're going to jack up the price of our product 3,000% and see what happens to you guys.
So they're very regulated on many different levels, supply, delivery, quality, emissions, price.
So these guys are now proposing that these highly regulated and compliant organizations should be sued for giving us the things that give us everything of modern life.
We would not survive a week without a consistent supply of oil, gas, coal, and related products to our homes.
We'd all be dead.
It'd be a zombie apocalypse.
So how energy illiterate are these people?
Why are they doing this?
Is it just ambulance chasing?
Just trying to cash in on the climate change hysteria thing?
And think of that.
That would be bad for taxpayers.
What would we get to do?
We'd get to pay the lawyers and we'd have to pay the other side because the companies would, of course, tack on their costs to the product they deliver to us.
It's insane.
Yeah, it seems as though there's no foresight here.
And you make a good point.
So the company sells you something that you want and then you use it and then you turn around and sue the company because you don't like the ill effects or the alleged ill effects of your own bad behavior.
It's crazy.
Well, they're trying to use the tobacco analogy and the tobacco analogy is completely false.
You know, back in the 1600s, King James I wrote, what did he call it, the counterblast against tobacco and he noted how tobacco was bad for your health and he didn't want it anywhere near him.
So it didn't take lawsuits to figure out that tobacco was bad for your health.
But fossil fuels have been good for our health.
You know, just 100, 150 years ago, people died at age 40.
If you live to age, this is why the pension was set at age 65, because most people didn't live very long after that.
Well, now people live into their 90s, into the 100s, and often in very good health.
Why?
Because we can do knee replacements, we can do heart surgery, we can remove tumors from lungs and brains and heaven knows where, thanks to fossil fuels.
You don't have modern medicine without them.
So, you know, what are they talking about?
It's a crazy analogy.
Speaking of environmentalist wing nuts, I think this is a good segue into Stephen Gilbo or Gilbo.
Honestly, I don't know how to say his last name, and I think I'm probably not learning just for spite.
He's a radical environmentalist and he's a new liberal MP.
And I've heard musings that he could be the new environment minister if Catherine McKenna is shuffled out.
And somehow, somehow, the Liberals are musing about putting someone even more radical than Catherine McKenna in the position of environment minister.
That's going to do nothing for Canadian unity.
I'll tell you that much.
Well, you know, the challenge with him is that he and Marlowe Reynolds, formerly of Pembina Institute, wrote the press release or op-ed in 2008, I believe it was, that the tar sands are tarnishing Canada's reputation.
And that was the first time that I know of that dirty oil appeared in print.
So he was with Greenpeace for a long time, then with Equitaire in Montreal.
And although people like to think that the tar sands campaign was only perpetrated against Alberta, it's actually been perpetrated against all of Canada.
And it began a long time ago in Quebec.
Foreign Fingers in the Pie00:10:38
And, you know, about $11 million that I can account for was dumped into Quebec to mostly to the Global Climate Change Action Fund, which I read yesterday in an article by Corey Morningstar that the GCCA was formed by Greenpeace and World Wild Fund.
So the GCCA claims to have 470 organizations around the world, nonprofits in 70 countries, that oppose the use of fossil fuels.
So if you want to know why we couldn't get Energy East built, you can start there.
Then, of course, you know, he was associated with Equitaire and they were very active in Montreal.
And more recently, Stephen Gilbo has been the climate action advisor of he and a lady from Vancouver, Van City, formerly with Van City Trust, I believe.
Anyway, they were the ones who implemented the new EV policy for which we don't have enough power generation in Canada to meet their targets.
So that means we'd have to build billions of dollars of power generation plants and trillions of dollars of transmission lines just so people could drive EVs that can't drive farther than from here to Red Deer without a charge.
So these are, like I said earlier, they're very expensive people.
They're costing us a lot of money and the benefits are not clear.
And there's not enough electrical vehicles in the country for any of this to matter anyway.
You and I were talking off air about how, at least in Alberta, you can go on the government registries website and they publish the data about the types of cars, types of trucks, types of registration.
And a couple of years ago, it was under 500 fully electric vehicles in Alberta.
I guarantee you, most of those were bought by the NDP government.
And so, you know, they want to put in this big, huge, massive nationwide electric grid to really prop up this sort of hobby, hobby of rich people.
That's what I think about when I think about electric cars.
I think it's just a hobby for rich people the same way I like to ride dirt bikes.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Well, you know, by pushing the sense of climate catastrophe and that we have to get rid of these ICE vehicles, internal combustion engine vehicles, then they're trying to create a new market for all of the institutional investors because those institutional investors would be invested in those transmission lines and the power plants that they're not talking about right now.
And if they make it illegal to drive a conventional vehicle, then you'll have to buy one of these.
And boy, you know, look what happened in France when they tried to do that.
They still have thousands of people in the street in their yellow vests.
People who said, hey, you told me a few years ago I should buy a diesel so that I would save money and do the right thing for the environment.
Now you're telling me I have to dump my diesel and buy an electric vehicle.
I can't afford it.
I can't afford your carbon taxes.
You know, people just simply cannot keep paying this money.
And if you are a true environmentalist, why would you throw away a perfectly good working vehicle when it probably has 20 or 30 more years on the road?
Yeah, I mean, it's the same thing as environmentalists throwing out their old fridges and putting their old fridges in landfills because they want something more efficient.
And then they, you know, smile and tell everybody how green they are.
In the meantime, all their old appliances are filling up the landfill.
I wanted to ask you about another organization similar to yours that's doing great work, Grassroots Alberta.
And go ahead.
Oh, well, I was just going to say, yeah, they have a great campaign running right now on their website.
It's called Isn't It Time We Had a Responsible Conversation on Climate?
And they have lots of information there as well.
And I think that's a good question, you know, because I think everyone has concerns about climate or the environment.
But let's have a responsible conversation about that.
Let's not be hysterical.
Let's sit down and look at the facts and see if there really is a climate emergency.
You know, I mentioned a while ago and I did that video a while ago that there were 500 scientists who signed a petition that there is no climate emergency.
There's now another two or 300 who have signed on to that petition and it just continues to grow.
So, you know, these are very qualified scholars who are standing up and saying this is not appropriate.
We should not be scaring the public.
There's no emergency.
We have time to implement new solutions regarding emissions or whatever concerns we have.
But we should not be rushing into this and not scaring people.
So it's a growing petition.
And I think Grassroots Alberta, you know, which independently came up with their own campaign, is asking the right questions.
And people should go on their website and read their material.
It's very good.
Yeah.
And I know some of the people behind Grassroots Alberta are farmers and generational farmers who have worked the same land for generations.
So I think they're attuned to the climate and the environmental changes around them.
And so when they are posing these questions, as opposed to people who could go their whole day without ever putting their foot on some grass.
You know, I think that it's important to listen to people who are, you know, on the land and whose livelihoods depend on the weather every day.
Last thing I wanted to ask you about is the Freedom Talk conference.
You're going to be speaking at that.
Let us have it.
Well, Freedom Talk is coming up the weekend of the, I think I'm booking in on the 15th, the 16th, 17th in Red Deer at the Cambridge Conference Center.
And it's a great lineup of speakers.
My particular talk will be on foreign fingers in the pie, excuse me, foreign fingers in the pie, where we'll be looking at some of the interlopers who have changed climate and energy policies in Canada for the worse.
Danny Hozack is behind it, of course, and John Robson.
And one of the great things is that they're also looking for solutions because the focus of the conference is really kind of should we stay or should we go.
It's about confederation.
It's about the angst and anger that there is in Western Canada.
What can we do about it?
Where did it come from?
What's driving it?
And what are possible ways of working some of these things out?
So, you know, you probably have some people who are, let's get out of here.
Some people who are, let's stay and fix it.
And other people who are, well, how can we massage these kinds of arrangements that we have and improve them?
So I think it'll be a great conference.
So book it.
Yeah, I think it's at freedomtalk.ca.
I'm pretty sure Danny still has some tickets available.
But I do think it's interesting.
And I think you might be the first person who is sort of pointing this out.
The role foreign-funded radical environmentalists meddling in Canadian political politics, the role that's played in cracking this country right apart right now.
Of course, these foreign interlopers looked at the map of Canada and they saw a few very simple things.
First of all, we only have two major ports to speak of, Vancouver and Montreal for oil, right?
I mean, there's some also on the East Coast, but you know, that's a step further than we would need to go for a pipeline.
So that end of the country is already taken up and already had this bizarre thing in place called the NOP, the National Oil Pipeline Policy from the 50s, where there was an agreement that Alberta oil would not go beyond Lakehead because there was a Mr. Levy who came from the States and said, we want to use the Montreal port.
And everyone went, okay.
So that was an existing thing.
But these guys looked at the map and said, hey, all we have to do to get Canada, particularly Alberta, off the map, is just block these ports, block access to ports.
So they did that.
Then they said, wow, look, there's 600 Indigenous First Nations in Canada.
And many of them have been poorly treated.
Most of them have.
And so let's just go and exacerbate that.
So they did that.
And then they said, you know, actually, BC is so beautiful and green.
Let's make sure that the people in BC protect that natural, supernatural country.
Meanwhile, there's a port there.
There's the world's largest ferry system.
There's one of the biggest airports in Canada.
Cruise ships.
Cruise ships coming and going, like, are you kidding me?
But it worked.
And, you know, then they fomented this hatred toward Canada and toward oil.
I was just going through some forest ethics annual reports last night, and it's unbelievable.
The demarketing campaign that they ran against Canada for years and very, you know, just going to companies that might buy product from Canada and saying, if you buy product from Canadian tar sands, we're going to smear your name all over the world.
So they go, okay, we're not buying anything from them.
Like, I think that's extortion, but I'm not a lawyer.
But anyway, so, you know, they created hatred from BC, hatred from Quebec, hatred within Alberta.
And the Alberta Narratives Project, I would say, is one that is the most insidious.
Activist's Critique of Climate Narratives00:03:25
And I did a video about that last year, and we did a couple of items on the blog about it, where they brought Climate George Marshall from the UK.
This is the NDP paid eco, I think it was Alberta Eco Trust.
They funded them and then those guys paid for him to come here and try and tell Alberta oil and gas workers that your future is glum because oil and gas will not be required anymore.
Meanwhile, you know, it's booming out there in the rest of the world.
So this guy was a lifelong anti-oil activist.
He used to be part of Rising Tide, which is a direct action group.
So he comes here as some kind of missionary preacher to tell us what to do with our resources.
And I say, get back on your plane.
Actually, walk, walk.
Yeah.
Yeah.
With your carbon offset certificates in your back pocket.
It's so fascinating.
You know, as suicides were skyrocketing in Alberta, we had this foreign-funded activist coming to tell our men, our embattled male workforce, that there's no hope for you.
It's just disgusting.
Oh, it's really sick.
And this is the same kind of thing they're doing to these kids now.
Yeah.
I just read a paper.
I can send it to you.
I can't remember the author, but they did a research paper showing people scary things, scary images of climate and saying, you know, if you see this image, does it make you want to do something constructive or does it make you want to die?
And most people said they want to die.
So that's what they're doing to our kids.
This is a crime against humanity.
It's criminal what they're doing.
Child abuse.
It is.
It's brainwashing.
Like I joke about that they're trying to brainwash our kids in school.
I'm sort of joking, but really, on some level, it is absolutely actually true.
Michelle, you've been very generous with your time.
I think we're coming up on a half an hour.
Why don't you let us know how we can support the work that you're doing?
Because I think you're doing important work, educational work, and really work that isn't being done anywhere else by anyone else.
You're injecting facts into this very hyper-emotional conversation about climate change.
Well, thank you.
Thank you.
You can see our work on our website, friendsofscience.org.
We have a blog, we have a very active YouTube channel, Twitter feed, FriendsO Science, our Facebook page.
You can also look at our plain language bilingual website, which is called climatechange101.ca.
And, you know, we're happy to accept new members and donations.
And we work on a very limited budget with lots of volunteers, nominal subcontractor services, people like myself, and we don't represent any industry.
We may, you know, no one directs us from outside and says, you guys should do this.
We make our own decisions about what we do.
And we try to represent topics and interests that we feel are important to the general public.
And certainly, we are completely opposed to scaremongering of children.
The Case Against David Suzuki00:01:20
This is criminal.
Michelle, thanks so much.
I'm going to try to make it to the Freedom Talk Conference if just to hear your talk, but it looks like there's a great lineup of speakers, including my friend Prem Singh.
So we'll see you then, and I hope that the conference sells out.
Thank you.
Thanks very much, Sheila.
Keep up the good work.
I will.
Thank you, you too.
Getting little children into thinking that the end of the world is nigh just to push a pro-carbon tax anti-development agenda is frankly evil.
However, it's the sort of thing the CBC has given a platform to David Suzuki to do for the last several decades.
Now, if you want to find out more about David Suzuki's long history of hypocrisy, political meddling, and flat-out weirdness, I'm recommending that you check out my book.
I wrote it a couple of years ago.
It's called The Case Against David Suzuki: The Unauthorized Biography, and you can get your copy today at SuzukiBook.com.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody, as always, back here in the same time in the same place next week.