Conservatives' secret meeting with Calgary's oil and gas sector

On September 28, Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice, Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn, and then Environment Minister Rona Ambrose held a secret closed-door meeting with the country’s most powerful oil-and-gas executives. The next day, I filed an Access to Information request with the appropriate federal  government departments to get “memos, e-mail messages, telephone logs, etc.” and other records held by the government that related to those meetings.

Some of those records were recently released to me and here’s some of the excerpts:

• The purpose of the meeting was to give oil and gas executives “an advance briefing” on the Conservatives Clean Air Act, which was not unveiled by Ambrose until after Thanksgiving break, more than two weeks later. Ambrose led the meeting with the oil and gas execs, running through a PowerPoint slide deck laying out the government’s plan.
• At all times throughout the document, the bureaucrats advising Lunn talk about intensity-based targets and not absolute caps. Environmental activists argue that Canada should, like the rest of the signatories to the Kyoto Protocol set absolute targets and not simply reduce the ‘per-barrel’ amount of pollution.
• The government wanted to give industry leaders a heads-up on their plans “to provide clarity to industry and help avoid stranded investments.”
• Oil and gas executives were told that the goverment’s environmental regulations would
• “incorporate flexible compliance mechanisms, including self-supporting market mechanisms that are not reliant up on taxpayer dollars.”
• …[provide] industry the flexibility to choose the most cost-effective way to meet the emissions targets.
• Ambrose outlined the consultation timelines:
• By Spring 2007 – Set down guiding principles for the regulatory process and the approach to target-setting
• By end of 2008 – Detailed consultations on sector-specific targets and timelines with pre-publication of the first sectoral regulations in Canada Gazette Part I
• By 2010 – Proposed regulations published in Canada Gazette Part II and start consultations on the next set of draft regulations.
• “A core group of Ministers would like to meet directly with CEOs on a regular basis. Ministerial direction will guide overall consultation processes.”

We don’t yet have the list of those who attended the meeting but we do have the list of the 28 who were invited. I think it would be fair to assume that, given the importance of the regulations to their various businesses, the invited CEOs probably attended or, at the every least, sent a very senior person in their organization to attend in their place. Here’s a partial list:

• Harold Kvisle, Trans Canada Corp.
• Patrick Daniel, Enbridge Inc.
• Randy Eresman, Encana Corp.
• Clive Mather, Shell Canada
• Rick George, Suncor Energy
• Jim Carter, Syncrude Canada
• Tim Hearn, Imperial Oil
• Ron Brenneman, Petro-Canada
• Charlie Fischer, Nexen
• John Lau, Husky Energy
• William Andrew, Penn West Energy Trust
• Brent Smolik, Conoco Philips Canada
• Doug Haughey, Duke Energy Gas Transmission
• Steve Snyder, TransAlta
• Murray Edwards, Canadian Natural Resources Ltd.