Koch Influence, It’s Above the 49th Parallel Too
Photo Credit: (CBC News / Google Images)
Written by: Morgana Adby
The Fraser Institute has long been the boogeyman of the progressive ethos. A lobbying think tank with charitable status, it does everything progressives are ill-equipped to respond to.
Along with standard libertarian media, the institute also participates in research. The issue being, that often this research has a partisan slant that goes unacknowledged upon replication. There are a few ways to keep this under the radar of journalists and citizens alike.
Among the allegations of misleading information, these stand out:
In 2013 Fraser Institute tried to convince Alberta they were getting ripped off by their public healthcare program.
In 2015 Fraser Institute released a misleading graph that framed the Ontario job market as sprawling government bureaucracy and a struggling private sector.
Lastly, the most established fact check, Press Progress released a counter to the Institutes’ claim that the largest household expense of average Canadians is taxes.
From conflating two indifferent Y-axis on the same graph to selecting an artificially high average income to conduct studies- the Fraser Institute has tried it.
Maybe that’s why their funder of choice is the Koch Foundation, according to the spreadsheets provided by Desmog. It was also confirmed by a co-founder of the Institute when this information was made public.
The Koch’s are best known for being the billionaires that reshaped the American Overton window. Their business model is essentially to reinvest profits into propagandizing for deregulation, which in turn creates more profits. This has had a long term impact. Some have even claimed the Koch empire hijacked American Democracy, to prioritize their 'libertarian' agenda.
Unsurprisingly, the Kochs have their fingers in many Canadian pies, not limited to think tanks. After all, what would be the point of promoting free markets that they would have no use for?
In 2019, Koch Industries got out of their leases in Alberta’s oil sands. Beforehand, they were one of the largest landholders in the region. Koch’s empire is what it is because of natural Canadian resources.
This money goes towards the larger Koch political project in the US and to a lesser degree Canada. In practice, the funding of hundreds of organizations, just like the Fraser Institute. Any think tank that is a member of the Atlas Network is funded by the Koch’s among other giants. On that list of members is the Macdonald Laurier Institute.
It is practically common knowledge that the Koch Foundation routinely funds conservative media. What may surprise you is that one of these organizations has become somewhat of a household name.
Rebel News, in many ways a reincarnation of Sun News that had evolved with the Conservative Party. It has gotten more extreme with time, despite the firing of open White Nationalists like Faith Goldy. By more extreme, I do not just mean in rhetoric. Today, I am comfortable condemning Rebel News as an organization deeply steeped in White Nationalist violence.
In many ways, Rebel News is and always has been a safe space for Ezra Levant to fully explore his identity. The only problem is, Ezra Levant’s identity is one that encourages stochastic terror, deeply tied to the rallying cry of Gavin McInnes.
As the Proud Boys stopped being a cute internet meme, Rebel News was happy to cheer them on- or more often than not, scare them into continuing down the radicalization rabbit hole.
Regarding media influence in the mainstream, some have gone as far as to allege that ‘western alienation’ has been weaponized by the wider Koch influence on media and policy to reproduce division.
Although the specifics are blurry, there are many anecdotes of CBC, Global News and reputable reporters using the stats coming out of think tanks. Likewise, the extremism that is promoted by Koch funded right-wing media has a direct effect on the media world at large.
When more people see the world from Rebel News’ lens that is essentially the creation of a target audience, stimulating the whole white nationalism media economy. The impact of this population on mainstream media may be minimal, but still very concerning that it has gone largely unchecked.
All throughout the early 2000s, Koch’s influence in Alberta steadily increased and they maintained a solid lobbying presence. Likewise, at the national level, Koch Industries spent about 79 million in federal lobbying between 1998 and 2008.
What Now?
A challenge for all people that cover Koch Industries is that they are notoriously tight-lipped. The private organization will likely remain as such, and because of that their line by line funding is a mystery.
A starting point is to be aware of the influence, but until the firm is forced into a higher standard of transparency, it is difficult to know just how much our public life is the design of oil sand billionaires.
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