Chapter3 Looking into the Mouth of Premier David Alward’s Trojan Horse Responsible Environmental Management of Shale Gas in New Brunswick, Canada

Unconventional Versus Conventional Drilling of Natural Gas

While shale gas is a form of natural gas, it is more often referred to in the oil and gas industry as unconventional natural gas, partly because it is trapped and unable to move within the shale where it was formed millions of years ago, but also because of a process called “hydraulic fracturing” designed to extract it from that rock deep beneath the earth’s surface (Concerned Health Professionals of New York and Physicians for Social Responsibility 2020, 26; Howarth, Ingraeffea, and Engelder 2011). There are fundamental differences in the environmental consequences of the ways in which conventional and unconventional natural gas are extracted.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is the process used to extract unconventional natural gas. It involves pumping water down a borehole under enough pressure to fracture the rock in which the gas is imprisoned. The water is mixed with chemicals. Chemicals are used to facilitate boring, reduce friction, and shorten drilling time. Sand is added to the chemical mixture to keep the fractures open after the wellbore pressure has been released. The fractures provide a passageway for the gas to come up the well (National Energy Board 2009). Colborn et al. (2011) found that more than 75 percent of 353 chemicals known to be used in fracking were a danger to public health. A more recent publication suggests that the potential “ecotoxicological or mammalian toxicity” of the chemicals used in fracking is largely unknown (Danforth et al. 2020).

The cement casing around boreholes can fracture, causing fracking fluids to infiltrate underground aquifers, leading to the contamination of well water. In the United States, more than a thousand cases of alleged contamination resulting from fracking have been reported (Charman 2010; Concerned Health Professionals of New York and Physicians for Social Responsibility 2020, 33). Another concern is the thousands of tractor-trailer loads of water and wastewater carried to and from well pads, which damage rural roadways and bridges that were not designed to handle such heavy traffic. Air quality tests in Dish, a town in Texas with a well-established shale gas industry, detected the presence of fifteen elements exceeding safe levels for humans (Subra 2009; Concerned Health Professionals of New York and Physicians for Social Responsibility 2020, 60). Other issues of concern are decreased property values (Tillman, personal communication, n.d.), questionable returns on investment and job creation potential (Kinnaman 2011; Concerned Health Professionals of New York and Physicians for Social Responsibility 2020, 412), increased health care costs resulting from air and water pollution (Bamberger and Oswold 2012), and loss of revenue from traditional sources of employment (Barth 2013).

In short, many in the province of New Brunswick believe that shale gas mining is likely the greatest environmental threat this province will face soon. And since New Brunswick has already seen a rise in cancer rates in heavily industrialized areas (Milewski and Liu 2009a, 2009b), the possibility that more carcinogens will be introduced into the environment through fracking is alarming.

The conventional way of extracting natural gas is by drilling into an impermeable rock seal overtop a reservoir into which the gas has amassed after having moved through permeable rock layers beneath. In Alberta, these pockets encompass an area averaging 5.3 square kilometres (National Energy Board 2009). New Brunswick has a long history of conventional natural gas exploration and extraction. In 1908, J. A. L Henderson, a company from London, England, made the first natural gas discovery in Stoney Creek Field, just 15 kilometres south of Moncton. In 1912, Henderson built a pipeline, and for eighty years, it sold its natural gas to buyers in Moncton and Hillsborough. Other discoveries of conventional natural gas were made in 1985 and 1998. There had never been opposition to the expansion of this type of natural gas extraction in New Brunswick, nor would there have been if Premier Alward had focused his efforts on the expansion of conventional natural gas, something that most people would argue has significantly less environmental impact than fracking. What became problematic was the Alward government’s pursuit of unconventional natural gas, henceforth referred to as shale gas. The late Peter deMarsh, an anti-shale activist residing in Taymouth, New Brunswick, alleged during a public meeting in Durham Bridge that the provincial government was playing a language-game by deliberately misleading the public in its choice of language:

The working group I think originally was called the Shale Gas Working Group, but the name was changed. We were certainly introduced to you as the Shale Gas Working Group a year ago. That I remember for sure. The government, whatever the motives, in the way in which language, simple language is being manipulated, is creating the impression of trying to confuse people by changing discussion about something that’s of some concern, changing the discussion from something that’s of very, very deep concerns [shale gas] to something that’s of less concern [natural gas]. . . . And all I’m trying to get at, Dr. LaPierre, is that we got to get the language plain and simple. Why is the government creating this appearance of trying to confuse the issue, why not call a spade a spade. We’re concerned about hydro fracking the shale gas. Stop playing games or at least creating the appearance of playing games and let’s have a clear, honest, open debate about what we’re really concerned about. [Applause.] (Citizen Engagement Tour, Durham Bridge, June 11, 2012)

The following provides a timeline of how our struggle evolved from 2010 to 2012, before we became involved in confrontations with the Natural Gas Group during the Citizen Engagement Tour.

Beginnings

It is impossible to discuss resistance to proposed shale gas development in New Brunswick without recognizing the pivotal role of Indigenous activism. Alarms were raised in 2010 after it was discovered that the New Brunswick government had been secretly issuing leases to various energy companies giving them the rights to shale gas exploration and development in specific parts of the province, agreements that together covered an area of roughly 1.4 million hectares (CBC New Brunswick 2011). As is well known, what is today called New Brunswick consists of the unceded territories of the Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet), Mi’kmaq, and Peskotomuhkati peoples, and the province is required to consult with Indigenous nations prior to taking any action that might adversely affect the constitutional rights of their citizens. Yet these leases were signed without any prior consultation with the First Nations whose lands these were. Both First Nations and non-Indigenous New Brunswick residents voiced serious concerns surrounding the potential environmental damage posed by fracking, especially the contamination of water. First Nations were, however, fighting as well for their right to exercise sovereignty over their own territory.

Indigenous resistance intensified in June 2013 after SWN Resources Canada began exploration operations in Kent County, home of the Elsipogtog First Nation. The situation exploded onto the national news in mid-October when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), acting on the strength of a court injunction, raided an otherwise peaceful protest in the town of Rexton, not far from the Elsipogtog reserve (Howe 2015; Crosby and Monaghan 2018, 136–77). Armed with tear gas and rubber bullets, the police attempted to break up the blockade and began arresting protesters. As a number of those present noted afterward, although the protesters included many who were not Indigenous, the police seemed to target those who were. Similarly, images of burning RCMP vehicles were splashed across news reports—images implicitly associating Indigenous people with violence.

Beyond these images, however, stands another, now iconic image: that of Amanda Polchies, a member of the Elsipogtog First Nation, kneeling in front of a wall of armoured police officers with her eagle feather raised to the sky (see Polchies 2018). The events of that day have since been immortalized in documentaries such as Elsipogtog: The Fire over Water (Fault Lines 2013), aired on Al Jazeera America’s program Fault Lines, and Michael Primo’s Water Warriors (2019). Yet as Jim Emberger, spokesperson for the New Brunswick Anti-Shale Gas Alliance, rightly points out, it was the New Brunswick government’s own stubborn refusal to engage with massive, broad-based opposition to fracking that led to the violent confrontation at Rexton. “Ironically,” he observes, “that may have been the event that finally doomed shale gas and spelled the end of the Alward government.”

American Informants, Citizens for Responsible Resource Development, the Shale Gas Caucus, and the Discussion Paper

In June 2010, I attended a meeting at a fire station in Elgin organized by Stephanie Merrill from the Conservation Council of New Brunswick. This was to hear American activists Kate Sinding and Wes Gillingham talk about their experiences with shale gas mining in the United States. Sinding and Gillingham impressed upon me the serious threat that hydraulic fracturing posed to our groundwater. Following this meeting, Merrill toured the province giving presentations on shale gas and showing the movie Gasland (Fox 2010). Her presentation included, among other things, the names of nine companies that had been granted exploration leases in the province. Yet it seemed most New Brunswickers were completely unaware that negotiations had been taking place between the government and this industry. The four most active companies were Corridor Resources, Windsor Energy, Petroworth, and SWN Resources Canada.

In October 2010, Corn Hill residents were invited not by their elected officials but by Corridor Resources to a community meeting that I attended. Residents had received their invitation through a pamphlet in the mail. Corn Hill was the birthplace—a month later, on November 16—of a non-governmental organization called Citizens for Responsible Resource Development (CRRD). I became their elected secretary. Our mission was to raise awareness about shale gas development. In early July 2011, I and others appeared on radio and television to discredit CRRD after our chairperson unilaterally announced her support for the responsible development of shale gas at a joint press conference with then minister of natural resources Bruce Northrup. Following an emergency meeting in Sussex later that month, we planned our first of five marches/rallies to the Legislative Assembly denouncing the government’s plans to pursue shale gas mining. Similar marches occurred elsewhere across New Brunswick. These events were attended by hundreds of people from various communities. People marched together. In Fredericton, a group of Wolastoqiyik drummers led the march (Howe 2015, 64).

In June 2011, the Alward government organized a forum on shale gas at the Fredericton Inn. Participation was by invitation only. So about sixty anti-shale activists, including myself, paraded on the sidewalk in front of the hotel with “No Shale Gas” signs. Later that day, representatives from approximately twenty community organizations met to establish the first major anti-shale gas coalition under the umbrella of the New Brunswick Environmental Network. We called ourselves the Shale Gas Caucus, and I was elected its first chairperson. This coalition consisted of Indigenous peoples, Acadians, and Anglophones.

In December 2011, the government issued a press release outlining twelve guiding principles from which it would build its “world-class regulations” to ensure that the province would be ready in the event of an upsurge in this industry, as had occurred in Pennsylvania (New Brunswick Natural Resources Department 2011). I have listed these twelve guiding principles in the second column of table 3.1 in the order that they appeared in the press release.

Citizen Engagement Tour

In May 2012, the government issued another press release announcing this time nine locations where it would be soliciting feedback from the public on its discussion paper, referred to above. These meetings were held in small New Brunswick villages: Chipman (June 6), Durham Bridge (June 11), Havelock (June 18), Hillsborough (June 19), Grand Falls (June 20), Bathurst (June 21), Bouctouche (June 22), Blackville (June 25), and Norton (July 4). This was the first and only time that our coalition had an opportunity to debate this issue with government officials in a public forum, which the government called a Citizen Engagement Tour. The government officials sitting on the panel were Craig Parks, Department of Energy and Mines, as well as David Whyte and Annie Daigle, Department of Environment. The moderator was Mark Belliveau, communications officer with the Department of Natural Resources. The chair was retired professor Dr. Louis LaPierre, later discredited after it was learned that he had falsified some of his academic credentials.

Reading the discussion paper when it first became publicly available, I was struck by its level of complexity, particularly section 2, which is about “preventing potential contaminants from escaping the well bore.” Part of the reason for this, as explained to us later by Parks, was that the discussion paper contains technical information on things like lining the gas well with a protective layer of steel casing, cementing the space between the steel casing and the surrounding ground, pressure testing the wellbore, and so on. Even though the intent had been to solicit “constructive feedback on these recommendations from New Brunswickers,” as had previously been suggested by Natural Resources Minister Bruce Northrup in his press release, the degree of complexity in which these were written precluded this from happening.

The most damning accusation about the complexity of the language used in the discussion paper came from Maureen Burke (Citizen Engagement Tour, Norton, July 4, 2012). Quoting literacy statistics from the International Adult Literacy Skills Survey of 2003, she told the panel that more than half of New Brunswickers aged sixteen and over “are not able to understand and act upon information found not only within the government of New Brunswick’s ‘Natural gas from shale’ website but also upon information found within the . . . discussion paper.”

Obviously, that did not deter the members of the Natural Gas Group from completing their nine-stop tour in small New Brunswick towns. In fact, one of the most frequent complaints the panel received was about their choice of venues and how they had deliberately avoided the larger cities of Fredericton, Saint John, and Moncton. Julie Dingwall, a Saint John resident, voiced our displeasure on this issue with remarkable precision:

I want to talk tonight about democracy and the democratic process and ask you to go back and ask the government why they felt it necessary to make sure that cities weren’t invited. . . . We’re all New Brunswickers and we all should have a say in what’s going to happen to the future of our province because this is long term stuff. This isn’t stuff that you just say, “Oh, let’s do that today and we will see what happens.” I want to talk about [the fact that] in making sure that cities weren’t heard, you in fact removed the bulk of the people from the province from having an opportunity to come to these. Many city dwellers by living in urban environments in fact don’t have cars and I defy you to get from Saint John to the Norton Region without a car. (Citizen Engagement Tour, Norton, July 4, 2012)

Whenever that point was raised, we were informed that the issue would be taken back to the government’s attention. In the end, the cities were never included in the tour. Nevertheless, our coalition had decided well beforehand that we would encourage our membership to carpool and attend as many of the nine public meetings as possible, which we did. I personally attended the first meeting in Chipman, the last meeting in Norton, and the one in Durham Bridge.

All the meetings were audio-recorded. I obtained a copy of the recordings for each meeting from the Natural Gas Group and had them transcribed at my expense.

For each of these public meetings, picture, if you would, three members of the Natural Gas Group, along with Dr. LaPierre, sitting behind a table at one end of the hall. Following the moderator’s introductory remarks, either Parks or Daigle would provide an overview of the various stages involved in the development of this industry before leading into a dialogue about the discussion paper itself. This is how Parks related the discussion paper to the concept of responsible environmental management: “So, the discussion document as I’ve mentioned contains 116 recommendations and these are recommendations from the Natural Gas Group to government, for what we see to be the responsible environmental management [my emphasis] of oil and gas activities in New Brunswick” (Citizen Engagement Tour, Bathurst, June 21, 2012).

With those words, and for the first time ever, I understood what the concept of responsible environmental management meant. It signified the unconventional extraction of natural gas (shale gas) as a manageable risk requiring regulatory oversight via the enactment of 116 recommendations found in the discussion paper. In acting upon those recommendations, the concept would become actualized.

Writing about sociological description, Dorothy Smith (1990b, 105) explains,

In description, whether the informant’s or sociologist’s, terms are wrenched out of the setting. The social relations of which they are part and which control how they mean in the setting (where control is a social not an individual process) are suppressed. The terms are entered into a form of social relation of which the descriptive process is a practice. They enter trailing a debris of meaning behind them which we may describe as “connotation” when we attempt to analyze the present intimations of its uses in an original and absent setting. That debris of meaning originates in the social organization and relations of the setting to be described; it bleeds properties of that organization and those relations into the descriptive text. The language-game of description uses terms to do referencing, to locate and organize an object, and to do categorizing [my emphasis].

Here, the descriptive process consisted of the government’s practice of repeating the same introductory twenty-one-slide PowerPoint presentation to all citizens who attended any of the nine public engagement sessions. The fourth slide of this PowerPoint presentation introduced the government’s twelve guiding principles for the responsible environmental management of shale gas and contained the following wording:

Development of the document [discussion paper]:

1. 1. New Brunswick Natural Gas Forum, June 23, 2011
2. 2. Subject matter experts from within provincial government
3. 3. Requirements from other North American jurisdictions
4. 4. Reports, critiques, scientific studies, monitoring results and model standards (industry, academia, NGOs)

The social relations that led to the development of the discussion paper trail a debris of meaning only partially visible in the four bullets listed above. Below are the transcribed words used by Parks in his attempt to shed light on some of the properties of that original and absent setting from which the term discussion paper was wrenched:

[Bullet 1:] With respect to the actual development of the document, last year, last summer, we held a New Brunswick Natural Gas Forum—that was in June of last year. A lot of valuable information was garnered from the public and stakeholders in the province from that. [Bullet 2:] As well as subject matter experts from across government departments have all waded in on this, numerous times. [Bullet 3:] As well we did a cross-jurisdictional review of basically all the North American jurisdictions that had this type of activity going on. We wanted to see what their regulations and best practices were. [Bullet 4:] As well as some 300 reports, critiques, and model standards that are coming out and are still continuing to come out as this industry has continued to grow. (Citizen Engagement Tour, Bouctouche, June 22, 2012)

Each bullet would, and may even still, serve as a trail for further investigation into the “social organization and relations of the setting[s]” that led to the materialization of the discussion paper. However, for my purpose as a political activist ethnographer, Park’s connotations were sufficient in that they enabled me to establish what the connection was between the responsible expansion of natural gas, as alluded to in the Progressive Conservative Party platform, and the 116 recommendations contained in the discussion paper.

We learned a lot from participating in this Citizen Engagement Tour. Instead of being able to witness for ourselves what responsible environmental management had meant prior to the 2010 election, so that New Brunswickers would be in a position to vote either for or against the Progressive Conservative Party’s energy policy on shale gas development, it wasn’t until twenty months after the election, and during this Citizen Engagement Tour, that we discovered that their seven-word party platform plank meant fracking. But by that time, the Progressive Conservatives had already won a majority, which left us ordinary citizens—including retired couples, university professors, union personnel, grandmothers, and so on—with no other option but to reorganize our lives to become anti-shale gas activists.

This encompassed such things as developing the elements of a counter-campaign, which included forging alliances with other like-minded organizations like the New Brunswick division of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, getting hydro fracking experts like Cornell University professor Anthony Ingraeffea to come to New Brunswick to raise awareness, and attending the nine-stop public engagement tour to challenge the legitimacy of unconventional natural gas mining in our communities. All the aforementioned and more, which I’ve described elsewhere (Deveau 2014), is bona fide work, and while a complete description of its magnitude is beyond the scope of this chapter, suffice it for me to say that all this encompassed long drives in treacherous road conditions, myriad hours negotiating on the phone, and incalculable hours explaining to supportive, albeit uncommitted, friends and family why opposition to shale gas development is critical.

Marx and Engels’s Theory of Ideology

Marx’s theory of ideology (D. Smith 1990a, 35–45) is invaluable in helping us understand how institutional knowledge such as this concept of responsible environmental management is created. Ideology, here, refers not to the concept of responsible environmental management itself but to its method of creation (45). Marx’s theory of ideology had a twofold purpose. First, he wanted to affirm that people’s ideas “arise from material activity” and not the other way around, as purported by, for example, German idealist philosophy. Hegel and the Young Hegelians advocated that objective reality existed in people’s minds and that if things were not going well during a specific period in history, one simply had to will those bad thoughts away and replace them with more pleasant ones. This internal will is what Hegel called the “spirit” (Marx and Engels 1939, 42). Historical progress was, then, simply a manifestation of progressive changes in this spirit. Marx believed that he could prove the falsity of this notion by divulging the three tricks that the German ideologists used in concocting ideology. This gave way to Marx’s second precept about ideology, which was that as the modes of production changed, so did people’s ideas and beliefs. Marx believed that he could prove this by demonstrating a link between the economic activities of a given epoch and the thinking of its populace (14–15).

Recall that it was Marx and Engels’s contention that the first thing humans do to survive in the everyday world is provide for their material needs. For instance, during the time when the aristocracy was dominant, the concepts of honour, decency, and loyalty were prevalent. Similarly, when the bourgeoisie became dominant, perceptions about what was important in everyday life changed to things like freedom and equality. Marx and Engels (1939, 39) argued that the ideas of the ruling class became dominant because in addition to controlling the modes of production, the ruling class also controlled the means of mental production: “Thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.” What was of interest in all this was the willingness with which the non-ruling class in each epoch appeared to have accepted the ideas and concepts of the ruling class, as if they had been their co-authors. According to Marx and Engels, this was achieved not by accident but by ruse and involved what they described as a series of three tricks, which I illustrate in figure 3.1.

Consider once again the fact that during the period when capitalism replaced feudalism as the mode of production in society, the concepts of freedom and equality became predominant. This is represented by the large square to the right in figure 3.1. According to Marx and Engels (1939, 40), the first trick, Trick 1, in creating ideological perceptions requires that “we detach the ideas of the ruling class from the ruling class itself and attribute to them an independent existence.” Imagine, then, that these ideas take up a life of their own and become recognizable throughout society as being the kind of things that are for the betterment of everyone. Marx and Engels (42) write that “it is very easy to abstract from these various ideas ‘the idea’ . . . as the dominant force in history.” Notice here that an abstraction, Trick 2, as depicted by the large square to the left in figure 3.1, is being made from the fact. In his Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, Bertell Ollman (1973, 141) defines an abstraction as “a break in connections, a link in the chain which has set itself off as an independent piece.” After this is done, the entire process is then turned “upside down” (or reversed). That is, once these ideas that appear to be as natural and as normal as a midsummer night’s breeze become universalized, they are grabbed once again by the ruling class—except this time, the ruling class advocates that it is doing the righteous thing in upholding what everyone in society has come to recognize as the highest proclaimed values and principles of that epoch. This is depicted in figure 3.1 as Trick 3. Note that a contradiction arises here because these same ideas that have become universalized were implanted by the ruling class from the outset and are now simply being recycled.

Ideology, then, has several explicit functions, one of which is to conceal the kind of social contradictions seen in the above paragraph and that arise from class differences. Another is that it provides the means for resolving these contradictions in favour of the ruling class and its corresponding interests. And third, ideology makes it appear as if these contradictions occur naturally, so it then becomes perfectly acceptable for the ruling class to dominate over the non-ruling class. Ken Morrison (1995, 50) sums it up nicely as follows: “The job of ideology is to manage the contradictions by: (i) making them appear as legitimate; and (ii) by explaining the contradictions away by assigning their causes to sources other than social inequalities and class differences.”

In summary, this theory of ideology, as illustrated in what might be called an ideological circle, demonstrates how reality is fabricated in a manner that excludes the non-ruling class’s perceptions about their reality. In this manner, the ideas being promulgated by the ruling class become universally accepted as being in the best interest of all members of society (Marx and Engels 1939, 41).

Adoption of Marx’s Ideology to Responsible Expansion of the Natural Gas Sector

Consider that there are at least two different ways of knowing what the Conservative Party intended when it adopted the nominalized phrase “responsible expansion of the natural gas sector” in its election platform. One way of knowing this is that the unconventional extraction of natural gas (shale gas) through fracking is something so dangerous for people’s health and our environment that the only responsible thing to do is to have it banned. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a responsible “practice or activity” as “carried out in a morally principled or ethical way” (Simpson and Weiner 1989). The other way is to portray unconventional gas extraction as a manageable risk requiring strict regulatory oversight. My job as a political activist ethnographer is to explain to readers exactly how (as opposed to why) the latter gained precedence over the former—that is, how it became factual. In her Conceptual Practices of Power, Dorothy Smith (1990a, 71) writes, “Facts are neither the statements themselves, nor the actualities those statements refer to. They are an organization of practices of inscribing an actuality into a text, of reading, hearing, or talking about what is there, what happened, and so forth. They are . . . properties of a discourse or other organization mediated by texts.” Inscribing refers to the use of various techniques—such as asking questions, filming, reviewing the literature, going on field expeditions, and so on—to provide specific meaning to something like responsible environmental management that beforehand had no definite meaning. The mapping of how, where, and by whom this was done is the primary focus of all political activist ethnographers. Once something is treated as a “fact,” the “method of inscription” and the person(s) who created these facts about something become obsolete (74).

In our case, and as mentioned above, Trick 1 involves an attempt by the government to “separate the ideas of those ruling . . . as corporeal individuals, from these rulers, and thus recognize the rule of ideas” (Marx and Engels 1975, 62). Applied here, the ideas in the discussion paper needed to be recognized on their own merits and not as government propaganda. The following statement taken from the discussion paper’s introduction illustrates how this was achieved: “In preparing this discussion paper, the Natural Gas Group reviewed information from a variety of sources including scientific studies, critiques, model standards, best management practices and proposed or existing regulations in other North American jurisdictions” (New Brunswick Natural Gas Group 2012, 8). What the government is saying here is that the content of the discussion paper came not from within our government but from “other North American jurisdictions.”

Another dimension of Trick 1 involves not mentioning who the authors of the discussion paper are. The authors are referred to as the Natural Gas Group and are described as “experts drawn from within the provincial government” (New Brunswick Natural Gas Group 2012, forward). But we do not know who these experts are, what their areas of expertise might be, and whether they are civil servants, cabinet ministers, or members of the Legislative Assembly. The collective capacity of people to write the discussion paper has been transferred from living, breathing human beings working in government to a socially constructed entity known as the Natural Gas Group.

Once the various ideas that shale gas mining can be done responsibly through the enactment of those 116 recommendations found in the discussion paper have been disassociated from “those ruling,” referring here to the members of the Natural Gas Group, Trick 2 is “to demonstrate an order among them [the various ideas] that accounts for what is observed” (D. Smith 1990a, 43). The order of the 116 recommendations as listed in the discussion paper is not random but makes sense of and expands upon the twelve guiding principles released by the government on December 14 in its press release and to which I alluded to earlier in table 3.1.

Notice that an abstraction, as depicted by the square in the middle of figure 3.2, is being made from the fact as it appears in the square located on the right side of the figure—that an elected Progressive Conservative government supports the responsible expansion of natural gas. In her explication of how “facts” are constructed, Dorothy Smith (1974, 258) explains that a “fact” is “that actuality as it has been worked up [my emphasis] so that it intends its own description.” We saw earlier that of the two ways of working up what responsible expansion of the natural gas industry means—fracking or a ban on fracking—an abstraction made from the government’s particular way of knowing inferred that the contents of the abstraction, referring in this case to the twelve guiding principles, had to be aligned with fracking.

Note, then, that the discussion paper could just as easily have contained recommendations of an entirely different nature, recommendations that would shape the terms and conditions upon which a moratorium or a ban on shale gas exploration and mining could have been imposed. For example, the discussion paper might have quoted damning evidence from health practitioners like Theo Colborn and others (2011) on the deleterious impacts of fracking on human and animal health, or it might have highlighted the negative impacts on air quality, property values, and quality of life, well-documented problems that people have experienced in the United States, where this industry has been developed. But since the discussion paper intended processes and procedures necessary for the responsible expansion of the natural gas industry as purported in the Progressive Conservative Party platform, none of the above recommendations would have been seen by the Progressive Conservative government as appropriate pieces to “demonstrate an order among them that accounts for what is [proposed]”: a tight regulatory strategy to oversee shale gas mining in the province.

Trick 3 involves “changing the ideas into a person; that is, set[ting] them up as distinct entities to which agency (or possibly causal efficacy) may be attributed” (D. Smith 1990a, 43). Take, for example, the title of a news article released by Marketwire (2012) on December 11, 2012, by federal Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver: “Responsible Resource Development Supports Jobs in Atlantic Canada.” Here, responsible resource development is given the same status as a person. But how can a lifeless concept possibly do anything, let alone support forty-five thousand jobs, as suggested in this press release? Obviously, only people can do this and not the concept as alleged above. So somebody, let’s say X, although it could be Y, supports forty-five thousand jobs. In her investigations of management discourse, Janet Giltrow (1998) found numerous examples of concepts such as the above that she refers to as nominalizations. A nominalization occurs when a verb form (e.g., “to develop a given resource”) has been converted into a noun (“responsible resource development”). The presence of what is done by people is preserved (D. Smith 2005, 166), but the actors are nowhere to be seen.

So first, we had a meaningless seven-word concept appear in the Progressive Conservative Party platform: responsible expansion of the natural gas sector. Then, in December 2011, abstractions were made from this concept in the form of twelve guiding principles from which other abstractions containing 116 regulatory recommendations were produced after having established as facts what the guiding principles for those were. The process was then reversed so that as of May 17, 2012, these 116 recommendations now form the basis of the Progressive Conservative government’s policy on the responsible expansion of the natural (shale) gas sector. Another way of saying this is the following: “First . . . abstraction[s] [the twelve guiding principles and 116 recommendations] [are] made from the fact [responsible expansion of the shale gas industry]; then it is declared that the fact is based upon the abstractions[s]” (D. Smith 1990a, 44).

In sum, figure 3.2 illustrates how the guiding principles, first introduced as an abstraction (abstraction 1) during the initial creation stage of ideological knowledge, subsequently became the factual basis (fact 2) from which a second abstraction, the discussion paper (abstraction 2), was produced bearing the same headings used in the twelve guiding principles. In this instance, the headings initially fabricated and used in the guiding principles (fact 2) are manifested in the headings of the discussion paper’s twelve sections (abstraction 2), which, as depicted in table 3.1, are the same as those found in its intended progeny, the Rules for Industry.

In IE (institutional ethnography) / PAE (political activist ethnography), we say that the guiding principles, as manifested in the headings of the twelve sections of the discussion paper, are the interpretive schema that intend the headings used in the discussion paper. An interpretative schema is a “controlling framework . . . provided by the social relation that the text was written to intend” (D. Smith 1990a, 154). The social relation intended in this instance was to work up the adjective responsible as meaning nothing other than fracking under tight regulatory oversight. The headings of the discussion paper similarly intend the rules for industry and function as its interpretive schema.

Often, as is the case here, concepts like responsible environmental management “become a kind of ‘currency’—a medium of exchange among ideologists” (D. Smith 1990a, 42). The following examples serve as a small sample to illustrate the extent to which this ideological currency is now prevalent in public discourse:

• August 25, 2012: In a meeting with the editorial board of the Telegraph-Journal, Premier Alward told the meeting participants, “We don’t feel that we could afford not to look for the opportunity [to develop shale gas] if it could be done in a responsible way” (Editors 2012).
• October 19, 2012: Based on an interview with University of New Brunswick economics professor Rod Hill, New Brunswick should not expect exorbitant royalty payments from this industry. This was based on a comparative analysis between New Brunswick’s discussion paper and a similar report produced in Québec entitled “A Fair and Competitive Royalty System for Responsible Shale Gas Production” (Huras 2012a).
• November 5, 2012: “The governing Progressive Conservatives have said they believe in the responsible development of shale gas and want to develop an industry if it can be done in a safe way,” wrote Shawn Berry (2012) in an article in the Fredericton Daily Gleaner.
• November 16, 2012: Former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney told reporter Adam Huras (2012b) that “shale gas development could bring the province wealth, if it’s carried out in a safe and responsible manner.”
• November 27, 2012: On the day before the fall sitting of the Legislative Assembly, Dave Collyer (2012), president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, wrote in a commentary published in the Telegraph-Journal that “an effective and efficient regulatory framework ensures environmentally responsible resource development and assures the public that resource development can proceed safely.”
• November 28, 2012: In his throne speech, Premier Alward said, “We have a responsibility as a government to ensure that if we are able to develop natural gas in New Brunswick it is done in a responsible and safe way” (Morris 2012).

Experiential Knowledge No Match Against Ideological Knowledge

The next three sections illustrate how the feedback received by the Natural Gas Group from New Brunswickers who attended sessions of the Citizen Engagement Tour was filtered to maintain the basic integrity of the twelve guiding principles first introduced in the discussion paper and reiterated in the Rules for Industry. I also demonstrate how the Alward government’s surreptitious transformation of one of those guiding principles—public health—was used to our advantage as activists.

Conclusion

PAE has proved to be an invaluable tool in helping me establish proof that the Progressive Conservative Party’s 2010 election platform, in which they promised to “support the responsible expansion of the natural gas sector,” had an inherent contradiction. Whereas we as protectors of the land, water, and air had interpreted that seven-word promise as meaning a ban on shale gas mining, the Progressive Conservatives that formed a majority government in September 2010 took the twenty months after the election to dress it up as regulated hydraulic fracturing. This PAE is an example of how ideology provides the means for resolving contradictions in favour of the ruling class, and it demonstrates how we as anti-shale activists were stifled in our abilities to take back the word responsible.

Being in step with the government’s actions, though, and engaging in the frontlines with them in their Citizen Engagement Tour proved to be very useful in helping us locate a chink in their armour. This is one of the goals of many struggles. In our case, knowing that one of the primary concerns New Brunswickers had about shale gas mining was its effects on public health—and learning through our confrontations with the government that not only had this guiding principle been purposely omitted from the proposed regulations but the government had attempted to stifle the province’s chief medical officer’s report on the subject—proved to be a powerful catalyst in furthering our struggle to protect the commons.

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