Sheila Gunn-Reid and Michelle Sterling reveal the Alberta Inquiry’s 2023 findings: $1.3B in foreign funding—likely higher due to Canada’s opaque charity laws—fueled anti-oilsands campaigns, with groups like Tides and Rockefeller directing funds through Canadian ENGOs while media outlets, including CBC’s Age of the Oil Sands (2011), amplified bias. Philanthropies also backed alternative journalism, shaping climate narratives without taxpayer accountability, while Friends of Science, operating independently for over a decade, exposed these tactics in reports like Manufacturing Climate Crisis. The inquiry validates their long-standing claims, underscoring how foreign money and media influence distort Canada’s energy and environmental debates. [Automatically generated summary]
Oh, hey, Rebels, it's me, Sheila Gunread, and you're listening to an audio-only recording of my weekly Wednesday night show, The Gun Show.
However, I say this every single time I record the podcast intro.
This is the internet, and the beauty of that is that you can listen or watch the show whenever is convenient for you.
And I think you should really watch this show because this is a really good one.
Tonight, my guest is Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science, and we are talking about the Alberta Inquiry.
Now, what's the Alberta Inquiry?
That's the comprehensive report into the funding given to environmental charities and ENGOs, as they say, to block Canadian oil and gas.
Deloitte found roughly $1.3 billion that was directed at blocking Canadian oil and gas development.
And that's just what they could find because the charity rules are so vague that it makes it very, very easy to hide this sort of dark green money.
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Foreign meddlers paid $1.3 billion to domestic saboteurs to destroy the Canadian economy.
Oh, it wasn't the Russians.
It was American environmentalists.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
After months and months and months of delays, the Alberta Inquiry was just released late last week.
The commission was struck way back in July 2019 to look into allegations that environmentalists were accepting foreign money to fund campaigns aimed at blocking Canadian oil and gas development and much more specifically to target the Alberta oil sands.
Foreign Funding's Hidden Influence00:13:24
These people even had a cute little name for this.
Those environmentalists called it the tar sands campaign.
And we've all seen the documents.
We've all seen the involvement of Canadian-based environmentalist groups like the Pembina Institute taking directions from foreign-funded environmental charities like the Tides Foundation or the Rockefeller Foundation, where the domestic ENGOs were getting money from these environmental clearinghouses of foreign money for their activism.
The inquiry was done by auditing firm Deloitte and found nearly $1.3 billion in this targeted green demarketing campaign directed at Canadian resources.
And there would have been a lot more foreign funding uncovered, but Canada's vague charity laws and this network of granting organizations put forward purposefully unspecific reasons for the grants.
And for these reasons, it makes the money very difficult to track.
Now, these findings are a bit of a vindication of sorts for my guest tonight.
My guest is Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science.
And she has been on the case of foreign meddlers and foreign funding directed at Canadian oil and gas for longer than a decade.
She's been doing the boring sometimes but necessary hard research into these sinister foreign American charities.
And Michelle joins me tonight to break down what she read and her takeaway from this somewhat complex report.
and she promises to do it in the simplest way possible.
So joining me now to talk about the report out of the Alberta government into just the sheer amount and organization of foreign funding flowing into Canada to stop Alberta's oil and gas development is Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science.
And I wanted to have you on, Michelle.
I told you this off camera, but I think it's an important point to make.
At Friends of Science, you take these big, huge issues and you guys read and research through these volumes of research and then break it down so that the normal person who doesn't live in this world can understand what these big policies mean and what are the implications for the real world.
So I just think you're such a valuable resource for people who really want to know what this means in your real life to have foreign-funded actors attacking Canadian oil and gas.
Michelle, can you give us a brief overview?
And I know it's a lot, but give us a brief overview of what was, I guess, achieved or revealed by that report.
Well, in my view, the most important thing is that it confirms absolutely and with cross-referenced evidence by Deloitte that huge sums of money have flowed through ENGOs in environmental groups in Canada.
And a large part of it was directly used to oppose resource development in Canada.
It's quite telling that Deloitte comes up with bigger numbers than actually the Allen inquiry did, but they couldn't verify the exact end of where those monies went or what was done with them.
But there's obviously billions of dollars that have been used against Alberta in particular, but Canada in general as well, to block development of a resource that in 2009, the oil sands developers group said it would generate $1.7 trillion for the Canadian economy.
And today, the energy resources of Canada, most of which are in Alberta, are valued at $21 trillion gross value or $13 trillion net.
So that would be about $342,000 for every single Canadian.
And yet people want to keep it in the ground.
But none of our competitors are keeping it in the ground.
All of our competitors are booing ahead.
And as Minister Savage said at the press conference, with the present energy crunch around the world, Canada and Alberta could have helped, but we just can't get our product to market.
And why?
Because there's all these ENGOs blocking it.
So, you know, I think the real value is it shows people that there actually is a tar sands campaign.
It is and has been largely foreign funded.
And sadly, I guess all the domestic funding was not totally researched because what happened early on is that Tides was funded by the Oak Foundation to develop a $30 million domestic fund in Canada.
And the Sierra Club was also tasked by the Oak Foundation to set up a general fund to fund climate change activities in Canada.
I don't know if that ever happened, but I suspect it did.
So, you know, perhaps there are these extra big funds somewhere in Canada that continue to fund these groups.
Nonetheless, the top 40 environmental groups in Canada from our own reports show that the top 40 had revenues between 2000 and 2018 that were 18 times the revenues of all combined political parties in Canada.
So this just shows you how imbalanced the power and money is and influence in Canada.
You know, that was a problem.
It definitely is because as you point out, Deloitte really couldn't even get the full forensic accounting of this because of the vagaries in the law.
So the findings say between 2003 and 2019, Canadian-based environmental initiatives received $1.28 billion in foreign funding.
The commissioner noted this amount is likely significantly understates the true funding value as Canadian charity law, which allows re-granting of these donations, renders many donations untraceable.
They were able to find $325 million that was received for Canadian-based environmental initiatives, which remained in the U.S., such as anti-pipeline campaigns.
Yeah, and it's interesting, like I've seen a few tweets where David Kahn is squawking about using the $1.2 billion figure, because apparently a large part of that was dedicated toward conservation and land issues.
But really, what do these conservation and land issues mean?
Sometimes it's things like the Great Bear Rainforest, which is now a carbon credit trading place.
Canadians don't benefit from that.
Or, sorry to sort of interrupt you, Yellowstone to Yukon, which is basically a tool to use grizzly bear habitat to block Eastern Slopes oil and gas development.
Right.
I wrote an op-ed in 2013 and I called it the Great Eco Wall of Canada.
And it was precisely that, that all of these areas are being staked out in, particularly in British Columbia, as special areas, conservation areas, et cetera, et cetera.
Well, then you can't put any kind of resource development there, but look, you're saving the planet.
So, you know, so to say that these conservation programs had nothing to do with blocking resource development is false.
Although, again, it's very hard to say, oh, look, they put together this park and now it's untouchable.
But did the people involved intend? to block development or were they really, you know, park lovers and this was their passion in life.
And, you know, and I think that that was actually kind of very fair of the commissioner to note that many people are concerned about climate change.
Many people are concerned about nature and conservancy.
That's fair, but the way in which this whole program has developed was not open and transparent.
So those who had different views did not have the same opportunity to challenge or confront these groups as they develop their plans.
You know, we saw this unfold in real time right after the NDP got elected here in Alberta, where they tried to basically turn a big chunk of southern Alberta near the Crozes Pass into a park.
And the people who actually use the land said, oh, no, no, we don't need a park here because that will prohibit what we are able to do here.
The people who actually, for generations of their own cost and time, went out and took care of the land and used the land.
And there was no government involvement.
It wasn't like it was being damaged irreparably in any way by the use of the people who were using it.
But the NDP figured, oh, we'll just turn this into a park.
Everybody loves parks.
Yeah, except the people who actually use the land.
And so that was really interesting to see unfold.
Now, getting back to the topic of the vague charity laws, Bill Morneau, no longer in Trudeau's cabinet, thankfully.
He's probably crying his eyes out, dabbing his tears with money in his forgotten French villa.
But he wanted to make charity laws even more vague.
And Friends of Science wrote a letter with regard to that to Bill Morneau.
Yes, well, this was in the fall of 2018, I believe.
And they were about to make it possible for charities to use 100% of their revenues in nonpartisan political activities.
And up to that point in time, they'd only been allowed to use 10%.
So if people want to have sort of a quick view of some of the what we think are damaging implications of these environmental charities actions in Canada, you could just look at that letter because we list about 10 items there that show very simply the direct activities that were damaging to this nation and to our economy.
And then you don't have to kind of go through 600 pages of material.
And of course, by the spring, they did pass that legislation.
So now these big fat charities, ENGO charities, have the right to use 100% of their revenues in non-partisan political activity.
But since they have so much power and money, most politicians play along with them or go along with them because otherwise they won't get elected.
So, you know, they've completely skewed the election platform of Canada just by their power and money.
You know, I do sign up for the emails from these environmental NGOs just to see what they're up to.
And you cannot go in your email inbox during election season because that's all you get from them.
And so, you know, when they say, oh, we're non-political, yeah, but you've just emailed me, email blasted me four times today on liberal policies without ever saying liberal, liberal, liberal.
You're doing partisan things.
And I guess, based on the Deloitte, really, it's a forensic audit as best that they can do.
I guess stopping at 2019 because of what Bill Mourneau did, that's the best we can do because going forward, it's going to be even harder to track this money.
And I think it was Mark Bloomberg from Charities Law.
I forget the name of his organization.
Anyway, he deals only with charities, but he noted, and it's in our report, Green Titanic, that up until the change of law, if we took just the 10% that charities, and this is all charities in Canada, the 10% that they were allowed to spend on political activity, that would be $25 billion.
Green Trade War Protests00:07:23
And now it's 100%.
And it's a multi-billion dollar industry.
I think it's like almost the same size as the GDP.
It's crazy.
It's an insane amount of money.
Now, you guys have a really great report.
It's called Fear and Loathing, History, Context, and Observations.
And you've really broken down the path to becoming an international pariah.
I think inaccurately, of course, but how that happened.
And it was basically a marketing campaign in reverse for Alberta oil and gas.
And it's funded by all this money.
And in the meantime, oil companies are saying, look, we care about the environment.
They're going to leave us alone.
We'll throw some money at the Pembina Institute.
They'll leave us alone.
But behind them was this organized network of eco-radicals who didn't care what sort of bone you threw them.
They were coming to get you.
And now we are 10 years later, and they're getting their way on basically everything.
We haven't had a pipeline built in this country in Lord knows how long.
Well, it's interesting to note that in 2014, I believe it was, we had gotten kind of a toehold in Italy as a supplier.
And of course, in Europe, there had been quite a fight under the EU Fuel Quality Directive, where they wanted to label Alberta oil as dirty oil.
And we managed to evade that labeling.
But after we got that toehold in Italy, the government announced that we would be, you know, that Canada would be building pipelines in all directions.
And within two or three years of that, all of those pipelines were blocked.
So you have to recognize that this was a very strategic plan and implemented very well.
But yes, in fear and loathing, what we tried to do is to give the big picture of how the tar sands campaign unfolded and some of the other moving parts behind it.
Like a lot of it is funded by these organizations that also belong to Climate Works in the States.
And Climate Works is a group of big green tax-free philanthropies who want to impose carbon cap and trade worldwide.
They want to develop two cap and trade systems, one in North America and one in Europe.
And they want to cause a sea change in the world economy.
That's literally how they describe it.
So this comes from the work of Matthew Nisbet.
He's an American climate change communications researcher, and he's done a peer-reviewed study that's also quite good to read, mostly because, again, it simplifies the story.
It's not really about the tar sands, but all the people involved are associated with funding of the tar sands campaign.
And so, you can draw the conclusion that Design to Win, which was featured also in the Allen Inquiry report, but he focuses on Design to Win and how, say, Bloomberg has pumped, I don't know, 150 million or so into the Sierra Club to denigrate coal, to phase out coal, and to denigrate fossil fuels.
So, you know, you have these charities that are getting hundreds of millions of dollars because their charities, other donors and individuals give to them thinking, yeah, I want a clean planet.
I want, you know, happy children here, half 10 bucks, half $20.
And they don't realize that it's actually a proxy war.
And maybe many of the actors in these organizations don't realize that either.
Maybe they're true ideologues, but the fact is it's a green trade war.
And that's a subsequent report that we wrote after fear and loathing.
It was when Environmental Defense came out with their report claiming that, oh, you know, the tar sands campaign is nothing.
It's just citizen protests, just like anywhere in the world.
Well, we just went through and pulled all kinds of statements from these actual ENGOs involved in this and compiled them in a report.
And it shows pretty clearly that it is a green trade war.
Like, for instance, Sappora Berman's Stand Earth, right?
They're actually funded out of San Francisco.
Well, if you go and look at where their office is, it's about an hour or so from the Pacific 66 refinery.
I've never heard of her going there and protesting.
Why does she have to come 1,777 kilometers north to protest the Alberta oil sands?
And it's interesting because the Philips 66 refinery is refining oil from despot nations.
So you don't think that that might be, you know, a competitor battle there, a green trade war?
You know, that deserves more investigation.
You know, as you were talking there, there's the Cherry Point Refinery in just north of Seattle in Bellingham, Washington.
Why aren't the Americans protesting there?
No, they fund Canadian activists to block the pipeline, the Trans Mountain Pipeline.
However, it's a lot easier to protest the Cherry Point refinery.
They just don't.
And as you point out, a lot of these people are true believers for whatever reason.
So that makes them really easily weaponized because they don't ask that extra layer of questions like, oh, hey, we just drove past that refinery in Bellingham on our way to Vancouver.
Why don't we stop there and protest?
And they just don't.
Yeah, no, it's quite true.
And I think that's a question that Ezra is always asked too.
Like, why are they only protesting Canadian oil?
Why not Saudi oil, Russian oil, Norwegian oil?
You know, it's ironic, especially thinking of the influence of Greta Thunberg coming here.
Well, back in Sweden, Lunden Energy is the one that discovered the Johannes Verdap play, which is a huge oil and gas play in the North Sea that's being developed by Ecuanor, which is formerly Stat Oil of Norway.
And I don't know, I never hear Greta say a word about that.
No, I mean, Russia is a lot closer to her than we are here, but they never mosey over that way.
They did that one time and live to regret it pretty quickly when Greenpeace tried to protest.
I think it was an offshore Russian oil rig.
Maybe that's why they don't protest in those despot nations is because in the Western world, we believe in freedom of speech and we think it is your right to protest.
And so these green groups use our best qualities, our civil liberties against us.
Green Groups' Foreign Funding00:04:59
Yeah, well, and I think the other implication that people have to recognize about this foreign funding, it was kind of like the seed money that watered these little flowers that grew into big bushes and trees.
And now these green groups have this vast forest of themselves that needs to be fed.
So they turn to governments at provincial, municipal, and federal levels.
And they're literally sucking the money from the tax school.
They're already tax subsidized, most of them, if they're federally registered charities.
They've gotten foreign funding.
Many of them have huge endowment funds.
Like I think the interest on the David Suzuki Fund Endowment Fund is more money per year than what we actually get from our loyal member donors.
So, you know, and many of them also over the years have acquired tax-free real estate, land, and all kinds of other benefits like that.
So that, but to feed themselves, because now it's a huge industry that will crumple without this support, now they go to government.
So many of them get these $24,999 grants from the feds.
This number is special because under $25,000, you don't have to issue a tender.
So these are kind of handed out like candy.
And many of them get very large consulting contracts.
I've seen one recently where Pambana Institute got something like $700,000.
I'm not sure what for because they're not really experts at anything.
You know, and we've recently reviewed their proposals on renewables and found significant errors in their understanding of how the power grid works.
And that's dangerous because they have been consulting to provincial, municipal, and federal governments for years, but giving them inaccurate information.
And I think they even go one step further.
They now embed themselves into government.
You talked about Sephora Berman.
She was on the oil sands advisory group, thanks to Rachel Notley here in Alberta, advising about the future of oil and gas when she doesn't think there should be a future for oil and gas.
There was, I mean, Stephen Gilbeau, as we're talking today, he will likely be shuffled out of the Heritage Ministry as a cabinet minister for Justin Trudeau into the Environment Ministry.
And he was the head at Equitaire, one of these organizations that did receive money from the Tides Foundation.
I think they even received a grant directly related to the tar sands campaign.
Then we have Zoe Caron.
She is currently the senior policy advisor to the Prime Minister of Canada.
She's the co-author of Global Warming for Dummies.
She worked as chief of staff for Jim Carr and Amarjit Sohi when they were in cabinet.
She's the past president of the board of directors of the Sierra Club Canada.
And then she volunteered for 10 years with the nonprofit organization, the World Wildlife Fund, Clean Energy Canada, CR Club Canada in Norway and Canada.
And I almost forgot.
Justin Trudeau's best friend.
Why can't I remember his name?
Gerald Butts.
He was with the World Wildlife Fund.
So these people just embed themselves with government now and then give grants to their friends.
Yes, well, and one has to realize that Marlow Reynolds, and he wrote about this in his Mutart Foundation-sponsored report on how to get your nonprofits going.
He organized what's known as the Strathmere Group, which is the top 12 or 13 ENGOs in Canada.
They meet regularly.
They've been funded by various big foundations, tax-free foundations like the McConnell Foundation, Trotier Foundation.
They claim to have 358,000 followers and $50 million in resources.
And Boothroyd Communications notes that prior to the 2015 election, they organized a media training session with them and with a number of marketing influencers and journalists to set the messaging for the 2015 election campaign.
So this is tremendous political and financial influence and cross-funded by these other big tax-free foundations.
Mainstream Media Influence00:14:09
And I don't believe that it's actually being done in a very transparent way.
Like it was Parker Gallant who first ran across the Strathmere Alliance and brought it to our attention.
And it's a very powerful organization, although loosely knit and not much talked about in the press.
You know, and that's what helps them further their goals.
You know, that's been the story of this from the very beginning.
They were talking about carbon pricing 10 years before we were even worried that a government would bring it in.
And now here we are.
But you've been dealing with this, Michelle, for a very long time.
You have a book called My Tar Sands Tipping Point.
And you are, Michelle, I love you, but you are terrible with promoting yourself and the work you do and the books you write.
But your book, My Tar Sands Tipping Point, is based on your correspondence with CBC over nine months regarding what you saw was an unbalanced documentary that CBC had broadcasted.
Tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah, that was back in 2011.
So it's kind of ironic to me that this Allen Inquiry report comes out now, you know, like a decade later, because I know when I first was writing to CBC, they thought I was completely mad.
And perhaps I am, but, you know, but I watched the tipping point, Age of the Oil Sands.
I think it was broadcast first in February of 2011.
And because David Suzuki was fronting it, because it was co-produced with CBC, I thought, great, for sure, they're going to set the record straight on the oil sands.
And I knew quite a bit about it, having worked at Alberta Environment not long before that.
And I was aghast at what I saw.
And I actually wrote to the CBC.
Well, first of all, I asked them to not run it again because they were going to run it again within a week, which is quite unusual in broadcasting or at that time.
And it was coming up to an election, although the writ hadn't been dropped.
And I said, you know, you're going to make people hate Alberta and hate the oil sands.
And they were like, no, no, no, that's, you know, how can you say that about us?
And that's exactly what happened.
But, you know, the other thing is that this thing ran on CBC's website 24-7.
And it was also later recut into a theatrical release movie that was released around the world.
So to my mind, you know, and it was all financed by taxpayer money.
So to my mind, this was the actual death blow to the Alberta oil sands financed by Canadian taxpayers, created and co-produced by the CBC National Broadcaster.
And it, in my mind, it did the single most damage of any element of the tar sands campaign.
And in it, there is a scene where Susan Casey Lefkowitz from the Natural Resource Council of the United States, who'd been working on the tar sands campaign since 2000, as it turns out.
Wow.
She's sitting either in Fort Chip or Fort Mac in the film and she's saying, you know, so how do we go about blocking the development of the oil sands and lists off everything?
You know, we're going to litigate, we're going to go to Ottawa, we're going to, you know, turn public opinion against it.
Check it out and they did everything.
Exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
It was all right there.
So for me, it is kind of a vindication because, you know, I wrote many letters to CBC and ultimately the ombudsman said, oh, and they often wrote back and said, look, we've covered the oil sands for years.
We always gave it, you know, great coverage.
And I'm like, okay, well, then give it great coverage again.
But they didn't do that and destroyed the reputation of what was once the pride of Canada.
You know, it's a real tragedy because like you say, maybe you were crazy, but I think maybe you're crazy like a fox.
You saw what they were doing.
And it doesn't end.
I was just looking at the Globe and Mail synopsis of the Deloitte report.
And they instead of saying all the things that we said, you know, $1.
nearly $3 billion spent to block Canadian jobs and Canadian prosperity.
And this is what they publish as their headline.
Alberta Energy Inquiry says no wrongdoing by anti-oil sands activists.
Well, I guess technically since they changed all those laws.
However, the whole point is this is how much money they dumped to get the success that they do have.
But this is what the mainstream media says about oil and gas.
They've completely, this, I think, is proof.
This sort of headline is proof of what all that money did.
Well, of course, you know, the Globe and Mail is quite a climate activist outlet.
John Stackhouse used to be their editor-in-chief and now he's with RBC.
And yesterday, I heard a podcast with them with Roy Green talking about how, well, Canadians will just have to be prepared to suffer for the good of climate change.
I'm sure he's not going to suffer.
No, he'll be suffering.
My point here is that, you know, this is an activist newspaper and people probably don't know, but many of the newspapers in Canada have been compromised.
For instance, Toronto Star ran a six-month series leading up to the Paris Agreement, which was funded by Tides.
Of course, they had the big disclaimer saying, yeah, well, you know, we're not interfering with the editorial workmanship here.
But in fact, most of the articles made ridiculous claims like that people were divesting from the oil sands when they were not.
Not at that time.
And, you know, so that kind of big money and that influence, I mean, look at every newspaper article.
Who do they quote?
They usually quote Keith Stewart from Greenpeace, Simon Dyer from the Pembina Institute.
You know, there's a list of ENGOs that the media always turn to, and they almost never turn to anyone in industry, almost never.
Or they don't give them much space if they do.
So, you know, there's not been any effort on the part of Canadian media to understand this or to understand the implications to their own country.
Imagine if right now Canada had that $1.7 trillion from the oil sands.
In that same tipping point documentary, Don Thompson, who was then the CEO of the Oil Sands Developers Group, said that during the 2008 recession, the oil sands was churning something like $30 billion through the Canadian economy and generating 450,000 jobs.
So, you know, those jobs also have a trickle-down effect because if you have half a million people making good money, they're also spending that money.
They're buying a truck, they're buying a car, they're going to a restaurant, they're having a massage, they're getting their hair done, they're buying their ATV, whatever it may be, but they're generating lots of business for other businesses.
So, you know, and you're not going to get that with wind turbines and solar farms.
The principal reason being is they generate nothing, nothing but renewable energy certificates.
You know, oil, gas, and coal generate not only the energy that's portable and energy dense, but also they generate all the byproducts and the product stream like plastics and all the useful things that we use, all the things we need right now for the pandemic.
What would you do without the PPEs in a hospital?
What would you do without the plastic, single-use, sterile materials for whether it be a ventilator or surgery or whatever you need?
What would you do without those?
So, I mean, people who are advocating for the phase out of fossil fuels and particularly the oil sands, they're advocating for the death of many people because we need those things.
We need that energy, we need that money, and we need those product streams.
Now, and for people at home who may not know, you might see a stark uptick in your local newspaper talking about climate change.
And you're like, whoa, maybe the climate is changing, because even in my local newspaper, they're talking about it.
Part of the media bailout was funding for local climate reporters.
Yeah.
And so these failing local newspapers in a dying print media market, they are willing to take this money to produce this content, fear-mongering content at the local level.
And it sort of skews the public's viewpoint on this, because not only are you getting it at the national level from the CBC, you can ignore that.
Everybody else does.
But also, when you pick up your local newspaper and you're like, oh my goodness, the Sherwood Park News is concerned about climate change.
Maybe I should be too.
But it's because those newspapers are being funded with funding directly tied to climate reporting.
Tax dollars.
The other thing that's important to recognize there, too, is when if you go back and look at the NISBIT paper that I mentioned, Strategic Philanthropy in the Post-Cap and Trade Era, you'll find that these big philanthropies have also funded all these nonprofit journalism sites like Narwell and ESMOG and Grist and Fox.
I don't know if exactly those are the names, but those types of alternative journalism.
And those alternative journalists have taken away from the former market of conventional media.
So they too have been funded by these big green philanthropies.
And so you're getting climate change from them from the philanthropies.
They're taking market away from the conventional mainstream media, which then ends up being funded from tax dollars from you to these local entities who are trying to survive.
So they take the money and employ a nice young reporter fresh out of journalism school who's been watching Greta for the past few years.
So you're not getting any kind of objective reporting from any source anymore.
And you're getting it from all sides when you turn on the TV or open up the newspaper.
Michelle, I could talk to you all day about this.
And I'm so happy that there's some vindication for everything that you've been talking about for at least the last 10 years.
How do people support the work that Friends of Science does?
Because like I just said, you guys have been on this for years and you don't have the big dark money that the people on the other side of the debate have.
So how do people throw some money towards you guys?
Because you really do work on a shoestring budget.
You compile these comprehensive reports.
You take these big issues and make them digestible for the normal person.
So how do people support your efforts?
It's a bit of a ministry, what you guys do.
Well, ministry.
Okay.
Well, just before I tell you how to support us, I would like to mention that we do have what we call our four green reports.
Yes.
And we have an additional bonus report called Manufacturing Climate Crisis.
So if people read those four green reports, these were written long before the Allen inquiry and drawn from public records.
And you'll see how this money is flowing through Canada and the implications to you because Robert Lyman wrote it and he was a federal public servant for many years.
So he knows what influence that has internally.
So those are very important to have a look at.
And they're short.
Each of them are quite short, but they make the point.
So to help us, to support us, you can go to our website, friendsofscience.org.
You can join us on Facebook and interact.
You can be part of our conversation on Twitter.
We're on LinkedIn.
We have a very active YouTube page.
And you can become a member on our main page, friendsofscience.org, or donate, or you can just share our stuff.
And we also have a kind of a youth-friendly bilingual site as well called climatechange101.ca.
So have a look at that too.
But we'd just be happy to have you join in the conversation and let's talk about climate change and these policies because the implications for you and me and everyone else are huge.
You know, and that's one of the things the other side doesn't want us to do is to talk about these issues.
They'd rather censor us, get us kicked off YouTube, you know, kill our podcasts, kill our Twitter accounts, kill our Facebook pages, and simply because we want to have an open and civil debate, which is all Friends of Science has ever asked for.
Let's Talk About Climate Change00:00:51
Correct.
Yep.
Well, Michelle, thanks so much for coming on the show.
You're such a wealth of information.
I always feel like I've learned so much after I'm done talking to you.
Thanks so much for coming on the show and being so generous with your time.
And we'll have you back on again very, very soon.
Pleasure.
Thank you, Sheila.
Much of what was confirmed in the Alberta Inquiry has been written off in the past as just conspiracy theories, but yesterday's conspiracy theories so often these days turn into today's conspiracy facts.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time, in the same place next week.