Russian Political Interference in American Elections....?

"We're going into our fourth week of digital door knocking and text banking and it has been incredible. We can talk to a lot of voters in very little time and we've identified thousands of supporters that we will be getting out to the polls."
"We're holding texting parties every week in the lead up to the election, where we text thousands of voters across the province to make sure they don't vote for Kenney's UCP [United Conservative Party]."
Duncan Kinney, executive director, Progress Alberta

"The campaign is about trying to persuade business to stop establishing offices in the province [of Alberta]."
"From the very beginning, the campaign strategy was to land-lock the tar sands so their crude could not reach the international market where it could fetch a high price per barrel."
"In 2008, two major U.S. foundations asked CorpEthics to reruit the groups, develop the strategy, crate a coordinated campaign, and act as a re-granting agency for the North American Tar Sands Campaign."
Michael Marx, director, Tar Sands Campaign

"[SAFE -- Securing America's Future Energy was funded] to help business leaders become compelling voices for government action to reduce U.S. oil dependence and vulnerability of U.S. businesses to high and volatile oil prices."
William Hewlett, Hewlett-Packard co-founder, Hewlett Foundation

"The Society [Living Oceans] worked with non-profit lawyers at Ecojustice to intervene in the regulatory review of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline and tanker project."
"[Living Oceans] instructed its lawyers to bring judicial review proceedings against both the recommendation report of the National Energy Board and the ultimate decision of the Federal Cabinet to approve the project."
Living Oceans report to the IRS for taxation purposes

Miles of unused pipe, prepared for the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline, sit rusting in North Dakota.    Andrew Burton/Getty Images

Where to start? Some familiar names, perhaps: Northern Gateway, Energy East, Keystone XL, Trans Mountain, Line 3 -- targets all, by environmental groups to ensure that Alberta doesn't get the pipelines it needs to stop the forced sales of its petroleum products solely to the American market at a steep discount that sees Alberta forfeiting billions in lost royalties and revenue, reflecting a lack of infrastructure to ship large volumes of oil to overseas markets where Alberta can anticipate a fairer price return.

The hugely successful Tar Sands Campaign has manipulated events through its constant appeals to environmental risks associated with the extraction of crude oil from Alberta to refineries on the U.S. West Coast and abroad, through its relentless and hugely successful branding of Alberta oil as 'dirty' and polluting to the environment at a time of global warming and climate change, despite that what full extraction and production would produce in its carbon emissions are relatively minuscule in comparison to American pollution levels.

Yet the U.S. monopolizes Alberta oil production at a virtual giveaway price, holding it hostage to its own energy security, aided and abetted by U.S. environmental groups, leaving Alberta with pipeline gridlock, overseen by a federal government complacent with the status quo, itself beholden for votes from the environmental contingent. Two groups, Leadnow and Progress Alberta, are partially funded according to U.S. tax returns, by the Tar Sands Campaign.

A Rockefeller-funded American organization called the Online Progressive Engagement Network  out of which comes the Strategic Incubation program, created Leadnow. The United Conservative Party, led by Jason Kenney who hopes to unseat the New Democratic Party in Alberta in tomorrow's provincial election has been facing a strategic campaign funded by Rockefeller-supported groups, to keep the UCP from power, replacing NDP premier Rachel Notley. The UCP has committed itself to overturning the U.S. monopoly on Alberta's overseas oil exports.

A protest in Washington against Canada’s oilsands. Bloomberg

The Rockefeller Foundation funds the New Venture Fund based in Washington which has in turn funded roughly ten Canadian environmental groups involved in the Tar Sands Campaign, groups that include the Pembina Institute, Sierra Club BC and Living Oceans Society. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Hewlett Foundation have integral links to quite a number of groups they fund whose sole purpose is to ensure that the Alberta petrochemical industry remains in lock-down. A situation that has led directly to the loss of at least 130,000 jobs in the province.

It seems beyond peculiar that while the Democrats in the United States accuse the Republicans of collusion with Russia in allowing it to use social media sites and false news to interfere in the outcome of the 2015 presidential election, American charitable foundations are busy influencing the price of oil in the United States through placing Canadian oil on the sidelines of the global oil market; in one fell swoop leaving Canada with little option but to market its oil at bargain prices to the U.S. and hampering Alberta's efforts to get its fossil fuels to tidewater to markets overseas.

Canada has more than enough problems between the provinces, with the federal government effectively and ruinously pitting the East against the West by favouring the eastern half of the country over the western half, with provinces themselves rivalling one another. Where British Columbia wants Alberta oil and gas but refuses to allow it to build a pipeline on B.C. soil. Where Eastern Canada gets its oil from Saudi Arabia rather than from Western Canada, and Quebec refuses its soil to be sullied by a pipeline, but grasps equalization payments as a 'have-not' province from Alberta's coffers.

AP Photo/Elaine Thompson