How Alberta’s new oilsands adviser dreamed up the ‘Great Bear Rainforest’ to rein in our resources – by Peter Foster (Financial Post – July 15, 2016)

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Justin Trudeau keeps saying that B.C.’s Great Bear Rainforest is “no place for a pipeline.” This assertion has no more rational basis than “Four legs good, two legs bad,” or “Because it’s 2015.” It does, however, reflect the extraordinary success of the radical environmental movement in controlling, or stopping, economic development by rebranding — or claiming guardianship over — great swathes of Canada, and infiltrating the political system.

Trudeau’s chief adviser is Gerald Butts, former head of WWF Canada. Go to WWF Canada’s website and you will find the claim that the Great Bear is, guess what, “no place for an oil pipeline.”

Radical greens scored another, and closely related, victory this week with the appointment of Tzeporah Berman, co-founder of ForestEthics (now known as STAND) and former co-director of Greenpeace’s global climate and energy program, as co-chair of the panel appointed by the Alberta NDP government to look at how its cap on greenhouse gas emissions will work. That cap, again, was the result of “negotiations” with radical ENGOs, including STAND.

The link between “no place” and Alberta’s cap panel is that the Great Bear Rainforest was the creation of Berman and her fellow eco warriors. It was conceived in the early 1990s in the wake of the environmental movement’s success in bringing loggers to heel at Clayaquot Sound on Vancouver Island.

Clayoquot, where Berman began her ascent to being the Canadian Queen of Green, was the start of a co-ordinated series of campaigns to control Canadian resource development: principally the (Anti) Tar Sands Campaign and the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement. They were, and are, all based on misinformation and intimidation.

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