As Canada faces an unprecedented health crisis, a leaked secret memo from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) to the federal government reveals the oil industry’s demands for exemptions from environmental laws, regulatory rollbacks, and increased secrecy. The 13-page memo asks for a massive rollback in regulatory oversight, a full stop to the development of any new climate policy, and for the industry to be exempted from the requirement to report on lobbying activity.
All this is quite appalling. And it has nothing to do with COVID or the desperate global economics of oil and gas. This is a crass attempt by oil companies to exploit a global health crisis to ram through every demand they’ve ever made, and many they never would have tried if there wasn’t a global emergency.
Here are the highlights.