Winning a Fracking Ban in Nova Scotia. Reactionaries Plot the Fight Back

OpEd by the CEO of a PR and lobbying firm.

Fracking: where industry, government went wrong

I am going to use excerpts from the piece. That intense and frank reaction splashed on the pages of the Herald is the cry of the local/regional corporate class [with an assist from Calgary] and the Chamber of Commerce boosterist types who the editors and many writers of the Herald are closest too.

The Herald has never been an ideologically driven paper, and generally low on sensationalism. Small c conservative. But the business class was pretty unified around "Nova Scotia needs fracking". We have had generally good relations with all the braodcast media. But the Herald would only report what we say or do when it is obviously "News".

They had thought the process to date was the model of how to get resource extraction done 'right'- with what they see as popular approval. They could not believe or accept that it ended with going from a moratorium to a tighter outright ban on shale gas fracking. Hence the outpouring of editorials and news stories and Herald columnists, plus the open forum for any of the aggrieved parties that wanted to speak or right. Some of those were the industry and industry allied panelists on the just completed Review of Hydraulic Fracturing. Some were from the broader ruling elite like Steve Parker, CEO of CCL Group.

Steve Parker wrote:

The clever, well-financed and organized efforts of environmental groups on fracking were very important in the decision to ban it. Professional staff of environmental organizations have acknowledged working hard on the opportunity presented by the Wheeler panel. They encouraged and supported those considering appearing at public meetings, writing opinion pieces and letters, appearing on radio and television and using social media to build momentum to the point where anti-fracking became the popular choice.

Clever and well organized. Yes we are, thank you very much. We are good at what we do.

Mostly we work very hard.

But we work smart too. We put a lot of time into discussing where we are, what are the opportunities and hazards in front of us and down the road. We usually feel we are behind in doing that, sometimes it seems breathless. But on that front we consistently win, and seem to have a better idea than our opponents of what to do, not just the motivation of what we want.

But “well financed”. Thats a joke. We do not have a formal organization. We don't have a bank account. When we cobble a bit of money for a particular purpose, all the arrangements are ad hoc.

more to come

It is worth adding that it also shows we have aroused the ire of our rulers on a national scale. I'm not going to dwell on that. And it really has no part in the story of getting here. The 'nation scale' lesson they get is that this is what happens when you are complacent and slack.... we better pay attention now. 

My discussion is about the actors on both sides of the front lines- mostly about us. But in terms of where this is or might be going, nation scale notability will have an effect. [Fracktivists and environmental activists in general have also taken note, for sure.]

Thanks U.

Steve Parker wrote:

They defeated the factual arguments of industry and science with organization and emotion, as well as anecdotes and opinions.

Emotion, particularly in the absence of sensitivity and flexibility from the other side, will trump data and experience.

Haven't heard those lines before, eh?

We win with emotion, the irratiomal fears, fears of change.

In our case this is a particularly rich inversion of reality. NOFRAC is only passable at organizing anything. Most of that is done by local groups even more ad hoc than we are. What we really excell at is data, research, investigation, and putting it all out there.

We had been doing this to great success for a solid year before the launch of the Review of Hydraulic Fracturing. That got what we said great credibility with government people we dealt with, despite not agreeing about anything. And a small group of reporters noticed, but the bulk of them went for the usual trope you see expressed by Steve Parker.

The Review panel members were left pretty much free to write their own chapters of the Report. Ony academics and consultants with credentials got appointed to the Panel [the latter group is how the industry people got included]. The panel members who tended to be fracking critics [but had not been publicly so, and may have known little about the issue before being appointed], wrote highly referenced work that considered the range of opinion. The industry and industry oriented panelists- even the academic ones- expressed their "expert opinion" without references and little if any recognition of the range of opinion among the experts.

The responses we wrote to each of the chapters were of a consistently high quality and always referenced. This was noticed by decision shapers, even if rarely recognized publicly. And distilling those arguments was distributed among supporters who attended public meetings.

There was plenty of passion and outrage at public meetings. No surprise. But this is all that the media narratives wrote about. But it had a profound impact anyway what a remarkable number of people at the public meetings were so well informed about this very complex topic.

I really do not know how much of the victory was owed to how incredibly well we did our homework, and how much was the obvious mobilization way beyond the 'usual suspects' that impressed politicians. And possibly doing your homework so incredibly well only matters so much in an issue that is so inherently complex. That might be true even where most people- for and against- are making their decisions on a limited amount of information. That can be true, and most important, but it still may matter greatly that there are a lot of people who can carry the more complex arguments on their own.

I know that lefties too often think that "education"- people knowing what is going on- is going to magically transform into action. And even if they do not explicitly believe that to be true, they act as if it were.

But I also know that if you can marshall yourselves to a lot of work for the long haul... very high quality and compelling credible information is a very powerful tool. And it appears to unleash effects you might never predict. IE, the use of that in lobbying decision makers is obvious. But it is hard to point to exactly how or why that distribution of 'popular expertise' played such a role. We just know it was in there. We did do some things to set it in motion. But we were never consistent or sustained at it. A lot of it seemed to be a process just taking a life of its own.

Something like: people you know are motivated, add a broad distribution of popular expertise... and look at that.

Continuing with excerpts from the good spin doctor. Mr. Parker....

Steve Parker wrote:

 

A large spinoff from the fracking issue will be the experience victory has given environmental and community groups.

He got that much right. It was picked up right away by fracktivists, and environmental activists in general, across the country. And people will be looking at the details and specifics.

Steve Parker wrote:

We can expect more of the techniques they successfully used, including packing public meetings, shout-downs, and constant messaging in all forms. Countering these techniques will require much effort.

That acknowledgement of course has to be followed by attributing it to trickery.

packing public meetings  = encouraging and mobilizing people to attend

shout downs = angry community members (rarely the long term activists) who before have had little of no chance to speak and know that their government has done its best to marginalise them... no wonder they are passionate and dont handle well droning 'experts' and their antiseptic language

constant messaging = this is a hoot coming from professional spin doctors. Messaging is part of all communication. But "constant messaging" is the repitition of stripped down tropes. And guess who excels at that?

Steve Parker wrote:

Mostly though, convincing the public to accept needed change is about dialogue, organization, hard work and respect for the concerns and issues raised by others. Industry and government must take their medicine and learn lessons from this failure to communicate on a fairly simple and straightforward issue.

Closing with the call to arms. We have been getting a great deal of this unusually frank talk.

[Just pass over that gratuitous attribution that we are all about "avoiding change". How disengenuously antiseptic can yu get? But this plays an important ideological role for the audience of the elite base.]

What are they going to do about it?

Steve Parker is saying that if they want to win back ground lost, industry and their like minded folks in government have to go out there and do grassroots counter-education and counter-mobilization. Easier said than done of course.

Volunteers to their cause are rare.

Parker of course stands to make a lot of money if his call to arms is heeded. His company will be needed. And at least some bits will come their way in the wake of all this. But it would be too glib to just chalk it up to that.

The public meetings across the province organized by the Wheeler Review played a decisive role. Government plays the lead in these things [whether there is a special review or not]. So the natural lesson they will take away is "no public meetings."

There is no credibility if there are literally NO public meetings. Their has to be at least a semblance. David Wheeler did not invisage them as they turned out. They were structured as window dressing for the pronouncements of "independent experts.".

For them not to be dog and pony shows all you have to do is show up with more than a handfull of people. And make sure people at later meetings hear about what happened at the earlier ones. That is not a small amount of work, but doing it unfolds in a pretty straightforward manner.

Although not explicit about it, Steve Parker is well aware of all that. Which is why he is talking about much more lead up work before you open the doors on public meetings. And that is only some of people working in offices and planning. He knows it also means legwork among the masses, meeting with community groups.

Companies are not used to having to put up the money like that. But they make it clear they are belatedly learning their lesson in BC.

And since the Maritimes is the first place they have been so decisively defeated [albeit not nearly as decisive as you hear in all the words and whining]... it would be no surprise if they decide to really put the rubber to the road here.