New greenwashing rules dubbed ‘green hushing’ at Alberta carbon capture conference

Former Alberta energy minister Sonya Savage decried new federal anti-greenwashing provisions as “green-hushing” in a panel discussion with the leader of Canada’s preeminent oil and gas industry lobby group on Tuesday.

Savage said the Competition Act regulations recently passed by the federal government muzzle companies from communicating their efforts to reduce planet-heating carbon emissions. Shutting down that discourse will have real consequences, said Savage, a former lobbyist for Enbridge who served as energy minister from 2019 to 2023.

“At some point, you're not going to invest into actually taking these environmental steps,” she added. Savage was joined on stage by Lisa Baiton, CEO and president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), a lobby group which recently advanced similar arguments.

The provision in question updates the Competition Act and requires companies to prove their claims that a product provides environmental benefits according to an unspecified “internationally recognized methodology.” It was wrapped into Bill C-59, omnibus legislation that implements aspects of the federal government’s fall 2023 economic statement.

The anti-greenwashing portion of the bill has clear implications for claims made by oil and gas companies about carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) technology, which is intended to capture carbon dioxide emissions from oil and gas production and store them underground. The Pathways Alliance, a powerful lobby group for Alberta’s six largest oil companies, is planning a multi-billion-dollar CCUS hub in northern Alberta and immediately scrubbed its entire online presence, while CAPP announced it would “reduce the amount of information” it displayed on its webpage. 

Savage, a former Kenney-era energy minister, who presided over the province’s “energy war room” and inquiry into allegations of environmentalist activists’ foreign funding, predicted that penalizing greenwashing under the Competition Act will take the “global trend in climate litigation … accelerate it and put it on steroids.” 

She claimed the growth of international climate litigation in recent years shows that the system in Canada is working prior to the regulations going into effect.

Later in the conversation, Savage said “probably the most concerning provision” in the legislation is the ability for the bureau to implement a right of civil enforcement, which allows any member of the public to file a claim to the Competition Bureau against a company suspected of greenwashing, which she called unprecedented. 

“A private citizen — and it could be environmental activists, it could be your competitors, it could be a disgruntled employee — has the right to apply to the tribunal to enforce the provisions of the Act,” she said. 

CAPP Wants Provisions to Apply to Environmental NGOs

On Sept. 5, CAPP made a formal submission to the Competition Bureau, asking that its evidentiary requirements for companies also be applied to “not-for-profit groups involved in raising capital for charitable and non-profit purposes.”

“In the same way that parties carrying out certain business activities are under the microscope, the Competition Bureau should make it clear that parties, such as climate advocacy groups, advancing claims against those businesses, are subject to the same standards in respect of their own communications and representations,” the submission added. 

At the conference, CAPP’s Baiton complained Bill C-59 “really silences one side of a very lively public policy debate and leaves the field wide open for those opposed.

“It puts restrictions on how we can communicate with zero accountability or equivalency on the other side,” she said. 

Baiton noted the legislation does not define the specific “internationally recognized methodology” to be used for assessing climate claims.

“There's no clarity on how to comply, so there is no substantive way to discern if you're in compliance or not,” she said. 

Until the bureau designs a specific methodology, approval from provincial or federal regulators should suffice, Baiton argued. 

There are several internationally recognized methodologies to assess claims, including the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, the International Sustainability Standards Board and the Global Reporting Initiative, among others.

Savage, without naming any particular methodology, described such tests as “ambiguous” and “very difficult to meet.” 

She added the legislation creates a reverse onus, requiring firms to prove the veracity of their environmental claims, rather than have complainants demonstrate those claims are false. 

Legislation Includes CCUS Tax Credits

The updates to the Competition Act are a minor aspect in the totality of Bill C-59 passed this spring.

Enhance Energy executive Candice Paton noted that despite controversy over Bill C-59, the same legislation contains the federal government’s CCUS tax credit, which she said will “spur a lot of activity” in the sector before 2030. “We're really excited about that, but it's not all rosy,” Paton told the attendees in her opening address. 

Savage agreed that most of the relevant portions of C-59 benefit industry, but suggested that its “two paragraphs on greenwashing” are part of a broader threat to the oil and gas industry’s long-term viability. 

“If you look at the intent behind it, there's a lot of activists globally who do not want to see CCUS succeed, and the reason they don't want it to is because it perpetuates and prolongs the use of fossil fuels,” she said. 

Baiton cited campaigns from environmentalist groups Oil Change International, Sierra Club, STAND.earth and Environmental Defence Canada as incidents of “activist groups targeting carbon capture and LNG projects, because our industry is part of the energy transition future.” 

A November 2023 report from Oil Change International found that 79 per cent of captured carbon dioxide worldwide has gone toward drilling for more oil, and large CCUS projects have a track record of operating in the range of 10 per cent to 60 per cent of promised capacity. 

During her afternoon keynote remarks at the conference, Premier Danielle Smith opted not to discuss the anti-greenwashing provisions of Bill C-59, which she’s previously described as “illegal,” “draconian,” and “part of an agenda to create chaos and uncertainty for energy investors for the purpose of phasing out the energy industry altogether.” 

She gave the feds faint praise for the CCUS tax credit aspect of Bill C-59.