It was hardly the strategy meeting former Alberta Premier Jason Kenney dreamed of.
And even if that had happened, it is not clear that it would have worked any better than the pro-oil organisation the UCP government ultimately created.
Whatever the case, the Canadian Energy Centre never appears to have lived up to its promised potential, and this week Premier Daniel Smith abandoned the idea. Dissolve She incorporated the organization into her own government and made it a less effective tool in her own fight to represent the oil and gas industry.
Kenney said at a United Conservative Party rally in 2018: Pledged “A fully staffed rapid response war room within the government to quickly and effectively refute every lie the Green Left tells us about our world-class energy industry.”
The remarks played well in a room full of pro-oil supporters who feel the province’s staple industry is under threat, and they surely would have been familiar to Kenney himself, who has spent every federal election in the Conservative war room firing back at the Liberals, New Democrats or any other party he sees as a threat to his faction.
Withdrawal of the declaration of war
After Kenney was elected premier in 2019, his team quickly realized that election squabbles and industry outreach don’t work in the same way.
The “War Room” name will likely be replaced with the milder-sounding “Canadian Energy Centre,” even if critics never abandon the combative terminology Kenney used in his conception.
The “rapid response” element remained a provocative part of it. First MissionBut that was only part of the story, which also included a team focused on research and “energy literacy,” which Kenney pitched as a $30 million-a-year operation that would beat out the PR machines of climate activists, but in reality A failed social media tirade To the New York Times Aiming for Netflix anime movies Because of the anti-development theme.
I tried to take down Big Green but instead Bigfoot Family.
The organization, led by Tom Olsen, a former UCP candidate and press secretary to former Premier Ed Stelmach, was also dogged by early controversy. The organization was set up as a state corporation, which makes it immune to freedom of information requests. Scrap Logo It was too similar to existing corporate research. Taxpayer-funded research staff Call yourself a “journalist” To publish favorable articles about the industry on our website.
And over time, the company became less aggressive towards critics of the oil and gas industry and instead became a content factory churning out articles promoting the industry. Prolific advertiser — Most of the budget has been spent over the years: A total of $26 million was spent in 2022-2023, the last year for which figures are publicly available.
And what has been the result of government spending, other than punishing anti-oil protesters? According to its own research, it attracts fewer than 500,000 website visitors per year. Annual Report.
More than a quarter of those clicks were from Alberta, meaning the biggest audience was actually home base, meaning a lot of publicly funded preaching to the converted.
“If you’re only targeting people who are already on board, you’re not going to reach the rest of the population,” Ryan Williams, president of Drake Oilfield Supply, said in 2020, a year after the energy center opened.
Kenney and his allies in the energy industry believed that where the industry’s own advocacy groups have struggled to spread the good news about Alberta oil, a provincially run (but arm’s length) organization could succeed.
But according to similarweb.com, although this taxpayer-funded informational website publishes more than 100 pro-industry articles a year, it receives fewer monthly visitors than privately funded websites such as Pathways Alliance, Canada Action, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and even the Pembina Institute, a sustainability think tank.
The X (formerly Twitter) account has 11,000 followers, while Premier Smith has 276,800 and Ecojustice has 38,100.
The brand has a strong Facebook following with 97,000 followers, but also advertises heavily there to raise awareness.
“This was meant to bridge that gap and change the narrative. I don’t think anything has changed,” Deborah Yedlin of the Calgary Chamber of Commerce told CBC News in an interview.
It has come to be seen as rooting for the local team. What the industry would really benefit from is third-party validation, Yedlin said. “You’re speaking out of prejudice. [up] It’s your own book.”
She added that calling it a war room “doesn’t necessarily foster a spirit of cooperation.”
Daniel Smith’s War
Smith made some quiet personnel changes this week, pulling several staff from the Independent Energy Centre into the state’s intergovernmental relations department, which now reports directly to the premier himself.
Those employees will continue their work under the CEC brand. Olsen, the center’s chief executive officer and earning an annual salary of $241,000, will step down after the transition is complete, Smith’s office confirmed. Social Media Posts He will receive three months’ salary as severance pay.
It was unclear whether Ms Smith would maintain his grand vision when she took over as premier from Mr Kenney in 2022. She did so for about 19 months.
“Having a name like ‘strategy council’ is not something they should be doing,” she told reporters Wednesday. (Kenney himself tried to drop the moniker in favor of the CEC five years ago.)
“They should provide good, credible research and data on where our industry is at, where we are in reducing emissions,” Smith added.
“And they should let me do the fighting.”
Smith and his team have certainly enjoyed fighting the Trudeau government’s environmental policies, particularly as Kenney has also seemed quicker to attack critics than multimillion-dollar provincial agencies.
of Alberta NDP And others continue to call the Canadian Energy Centre a bad idea. Waste of moneyAlberta government will continue to boost oil and gas with advertising and promotional efforts – NDP I certainly did. — but one of the biggest targets of criticism the UCP created no longer exists.
If even the industry didn’t believe it, there wouldn’t be so many Albertans mourning its loss.
