Blood Underground

June 12, 2011

The Best Press Gold Can Buy

Two weeks ago I criticized an op-ed by the Canadian International Council’s Jennifer Jeffs which argued for a greater Canadian presence in Latin America, and used “Our national corporate giants - Barrick, Bombardier, Magna, RIM and Teck” as examples of our positive influence. Soon after I posted, Mining Watch Canada wrote me via Twitter explaining Jeffs’ position: most of the companies mentioned were major donors to the Canadian International Council.

Yet this phenomenon is far more common than one might think. For Barrick Gold, it has become par for the course.

In 2006, Peter Munk (founder and former CEO of Barrick) and his wife Melanie founded the Aurea Foundation,”to support Canadian institutions involved in the study and development of public policy.” The charity is perhaps best known for sponsoring the Munk debates, highly publicized verbal sparring matches between intellectual heavyweights like Henry Kissingeran Niall Ferguson. But the Aurea Foundation also funnels hundreds of thousands of dollars to right-wing think tanks every year, propping up institutions which disseminate ultra-conservative views and research all across Canada.

In 2010, Aurea gave the C.D. Howe Institute $243, 750, a right-wing think tank which has attacked universal health care in The National Post and argued for the privatization of Toronto’s Water and Sewage systems in The Toronto Star. Aaron Regent, Barrick’s current CEO, sits on on the board of directors.

Between 2009 and 2010, Aurea donated $210,000 to the Fraser Institute, which has its own Global Center for Mining Studies, dedicated to creating the best possible investment climate for Canadian mining corporations, and which has been an important media ally to the industry.

The Institute’s Jean-Francois Minardi, in an op-ed for The Montreal Gazette in 2010, complained: “The mining community is striving to improve its environmental record and trumped-up, ill-considered accusations and over-the-top rhetoric should not be an excuse to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.”

Thanks in part to Barrick’s generous donations, the Canadian mining industry is an innocent victim of viscous “anti-mining activists” hell-bent on the “outright destruction of the mining industry.”

For $210,000, press coverage like that is a bargain.

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Colin J. Fleming

colinjfleming@gmail.com

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Barrick Media Press Think Tank

May 25, 2011

More Canada?

The Globe and Mail is running an interesting series this week, arguing for a more muscular Canadian presence in the Americas. On Tuesday, Canadian International Council president Jennifer Jeffs wrote that the “region offers tremendous economic resource potential, both natural and human.”

May 19, 2011

Anatomy of a Hack Job

In a fantastic article for The Columbia Journalism Review, former New York Times reporter John Sullivan documents the rise of the PR industry alongside the decline of the journalism business. The result is predictably disastrous:

[T]he number of journalists have fallen drastically while public relations people have multiplied at an even faster rate. In 1980, there were about .45 PR workers per one hundred thousand compared with .36 journalists. In 2008, there were .90 PR people per one hundred thousand compared to .25 journalists. That’s a ratio of more than three-to-one, better equipped, better financed… The dangers are clear. As PR becomes ascendant, private and government interests become more able to generate, filter, distort and dominate the public debate, and do so without knowing it.

In essence, the very people whom the news should be scrutinizing are now the ones firmly in control of it. To illustrate this point, let’s look at Bloomberg’s coverage of the latest outburst of violence at Barrick Gold’s North Mara mine in Tanzania.

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May 16, 2011

Canadian Government Dismisses Complaint Against Goldcorp

Mining giant Goldcorp escaped unscathed Monday after the Canadian government dismissed a complaint filed by Guatemalan indigenous communities alleging that the gold company “failed to respect the community’s rights to adequate consultation and consent, property, health, water, and the right to life in accord with Guatemala’s international obligations.”

So just how strong was their case?

Well, strong enough to earn condemnation from the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights (IACHR), who called for the mine’s closure last year.

May 15, 2011

Ignatieff’s Shame

With a single question, Jack Layton crushed his opponent, setting in motion the extraordinary rise of the NDP and the devastating humiliation of the Liberals.

“Why do you have the worst attendance record in the House of Commons?”

Ignatieff, who had already taken heat for his Harvard intellectualism, assumed the position of a snooty professor, waxing academic about his ” ‘respect for the institution of Parliament,’ before his voice rose to angry indignation: ‘So don’t give me lessons on respect for democracy.’ ”

Perhaps we can assume the best. Maybe Ignatieff was spending his time reaching out to the average Canadian, listening to her plight so he could better serve his country.

Still, that kind of record is indefensible, especially when you consider just what he missed…

Jon Stewart vs. Canadian Asbestos

Canada is often the butt of American jokes, but this was something altogether different. On Thursday night, Daily Show ‘reporter’ Aasif Mandvi traveled to the Quebec town of Asbestos, finding comedy in what one doctor called Canada’s “national embarrassment.” In the five-minute bit, Mandvi interviewed Bernard Coulombe, an asbestos executive, who told him that Indians could handle the toxic pollution because of their “natural antibodies.”

“That’s really fucked up, man,” Mandvi responded.

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