Good morning, Mr. Chairman. It's a privilege to appear before your committee. Thank you for the opportunity.
My name is Vivian Krause. I'm a Canadian writer and I have done extensive research on the funding of environmental and elections activism. My understanding is I have been asked to speak to you today on the topic of elections integrity and specifically about issues related to social media.
Based on my research, Mr. Chairman, it is clear to me that the integrity of our 2015 federal election was compromised by outside interests. Furthermore, our federal election was compromised because the charities directorate at the CRA is failing to enforce the Income Tax Act with regard to the law that all charities must operate for purposes that are exclusively charitable.
I'll get to the CRA in a minute, but first I'd like to speak briefly about the non-Canadian organizations that intervened in the 2015 election and why. As evidence, Mr. Chairman, I would ask your committee to please take a look at the 2015 annual report of an American organization called the Online Progressive Engagement Network, which goes by the acronym OPEN. This is an organization based in Oakland, California. I have provided a copy to the clerk. In the annual report the executive director of OPEN writes that his organization based in California ended the year 2015 with “a Canadian campaign that moved the needle during the national election, contributing greatly to the ousting of the Conservative Harper government.”
Who is OPEN, and how did it involve itself on the 2015 federal election? OPEN is a project of the strategic incubation program of an organization called the Citizen Engagement Laboratory, CEL. The Citizen Engagement Laboratory has referred to itself as the people behind the people. It says on its website that it is dedicated to providing best-in-class technology, finance, operations, fundraising and strategic support.
What does OPEN do exactly? According to OPEN, it provides its member organizations with financial management, protocols, and what it calls surge capacity in the early days of their development. OPEN helps “insights, expertise and collaboration flow seamlessly” across borders, adding that this helps new organizations to “launch and thrive in record time”.
Indeed, that is precisely what Leadnow did in the 2015 federal election. As part of his job description for OPEN, the executive director says he was employed to “advise organizations on every stage of the campaign arc: from big picture strategy to messaging to picking the hot moments”.
OPEN is funded, as least partially, by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund based in New York. Tax returns and other documents, which I have also provided to the clerk, state that since 2013 the Rockefeller Brothers Fund has paid at least $257,000 to OPEN. In its literature, OPEN describes itself as a B2B organization with “a very low public profile”. It says this is intentional as the political implications of an international association can be sensitive in some of the countries in which it works. In its Facebook profile, the executive director of OPEN says of himself that he can see the Golden Gate from one house—in other words, from San Francisco—and the Washington monument from the other—in other words, the White House—and he adds that he spent a lot of time interloping in the affairs of foreign nations.
What did OPEN do exactly in the 2015 federal election? OPEN helped to launch Leadnow, a Vancouver-based organization. We know this because OPEN's executive director tweeted about how he came to Canada in 2012, stayed at a farmhouse near Toronto and worked with Leadnow. Other documents also refer to OPEN's role in launching and guiding Leadnow.
We know for sure that Leadnow was involved with OPEN because there's a photo of Leadnow staff in New York attending an OPEN meeting with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund in 2012. Another photo of Leadnow is at an OPEN meeting in Cambridge, England, and there is a photo of Leadnow staff in Australia in January 2016, shortly after the federal election, winning an award from OPEN, an American organization, for helping to defeat the Conservative Party of Canada.
Leadnow claims credit for helping to defeat 26 Conservative incumbents. That's a stretch, I would guess, but in a few ridings I think it stands to reason that Leadnow may have had an impact on the vote.
For example, in Winnipeg's Elmwood—Transcona riding, where Leadnow had full-time staff, the Conservative incumbent lost by only 61 votes. Leadnow has presented itself as a thoroughly Canadian youth-led organization, the brainchild of two university students, but as we now know, that is not the whole story.
I think it is important to note that this Rockefeller-backed effort to topple the Canadian government did not emerge out of thin air. This effort to influence Canada's federal election was part and parcel of another Rockefeller-funded campaign called the tar sands campaign, which began in 2008, 10 years ago. Indeed, the tar sands campaign itself has also taken credit in writing for helping to defeat the federal government in 2015.
For many years, the strategy of the tar sands campaign was not entirely clear, but now it is. Now the strategy of the tar sands campaign is plenty clear, because the individual who wrote the original strategy and has been leading the campaign for more than a decade has written, “From the very beginning, the campaign strategy was to land-lock the tar sands so their crude could not reach the international market where it could fetch a high price per barrel.”
Now, turning to the CRA, I'll be brief. As an example of what I regret to say I think is a failure on the part of the charities directorate to enforce the Income Tax Act, I referred the committee to three charities. These are the DI Foundation, the Salal Foundation, and Tides Canada Foundation. As I see it, the DI Foundation and the Salal Foundation are shell charities that are used to Canadianize funds and put distance between Tides Canada Foundation and the Dogwood initiative. The DI Foundation, a registered charity, has done absolutely nothing but channel funds from Tides Canada Foundation to the Dogwood initiative, which is one of the most politically active organizations in our country.
In the 2015 federal election, the Dogwood initiative was a registered third party, and it reported, for example, that it received $19,000 from Google. The Dogwood initiative is also one of the main organizations in the tar sands campaign, as it received more than $1 million from the American Tides Foundation in San Francisco. One of its largest funders, in fact, I believe its single largest funder, is Google.
According to U.S. tax returns for 2016, Google paid Tides $69 million. The Tides Foundation in turn is one of the key intermediary organizations in the tar sands campaign, and has made more than 400 payments by cheques and wire transfers to organizations involved in the campaign to landlock Canadian crude and keep it out of international markets.
Mr. Chairman, in conclusion, I think it's important to note that the interference in the 2015 federal election was done with a purpose. It was done as part of a campaign to landlock one of our most important national exports. I hope that my remarks have given you a glimpse of some of the players that were involved, the magnitude of the resources at their disposal, and perhaps also some actionable insights about what your committee could do to better protect the integrity of our elections in the future.
Thank you very much.