"Canadian pipeline groups spend big to pose as Indigenous champions", March 10 2022

Oil and gas companies and lobby groups in Canada are heavily investing in campaigns to present themselves as defenders of Indigenous interests in the face of high-profile protests against a controversial natural gas pipeline on First Nation land, a new investigation by Eco-Bot.Net and the Guardian has found.

The fossil fuel groups spent some C$122,000 (US$95,249) on more than 400 targeted Facebook and Instagram ads over the past two years relating to various oil and gas projects throughout the country... The vast majority of the ads... were linked to the Coastal GasLink pipeline, the site of intense protest and violent police crackdown in recent years.

Analysis of Facebook advertisements from January 2020 to the present by Eco-Bot.Net, a research project exposing climate crisis misinformation and corporate greenwashing online, has found a steady flow of “Indigenous-washing” ad campaigns from TC Energy, the company behind the pipeline, and associated oil and gas lobby groups...

In October last year, solidarity protests were held in British Columbia and other parts of the country after a Wet’suwet’en hereditary chief was arrested for blocking pipeline construction. Over the subsequent five week period, TC Energy and affiliated groups launched dozens of ads which were shown 1.7m times across Canada. Together they paid C$14,000 to Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company. Advertising rose in the days after the chief’s arrest, and then spiked during the enforcement of a court injunction to remove land defenders.

About half of these ads were targeted at British Columbia, with some ads reaching viewers from within a small “estimated audience size”...

Using terminology such as land “defender”, “eco-colonialism” and “reconciliation”, the ads employ buzzwords and phrases used in Indigenous rights discourse to portray the oil and gas companies as aligned with Indigenous groups...

Lobby groups paying for the ads include the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), which count Coastal GasLink pipeline partners Shell, Petronas Energy and PetroChina as members. Another involved lobby group, the Canadian Energy Centre, is financed by the Government of Alberta’s Technology, Innovation and Emissions Reduction fund, which oil and gas companies, including TC Energy, pay into.The strategy of elevating the views of Indigenous people who are in favour of the pipeline “pits folks against each other in our communities, driving that divide and conquer tactic that we’ve encountered every step of the way since colonisation,” said Karla Tait, a member of the Gilseyhu Clan of the Wet’suwet’en.

In response to a request for comment, TC Energy and CAPP reiterated their support from the band councils, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) said it had no choice but to enforce the injunction. The Government of British Columbia, the Canadian Energy Centre and the Wet’suwet’en band chiefs and councils contacted by the Guardian did not provide comment...