7 “Our Oil”Extractive Populism in Canadian Social Media

Shane Gunster, Robert Neubauer, John Bermingham, and Alicia Massie

“Think of this like a football game and we’re not putting enough players in the field. They’ve got people in every local community trying to create delay and create obstruction.” So said Cody Battershill, a Calgary realtor, founder of the social media campaigns Oil Sands Action and Canada Action, and a vocal supporter of Canada’s oil and gas industry. In an interview with radio personality and former right-wing provincial politician Danielle Smith, Battershill (2018) described a beleaguered industry under attack from a “very sophisticated, well-organized public relations campaign” intent on destroying the Albertan economy. But rather than simply decry the conspiracies of what former federal natural resources minister Joe Oliver (2012) famously described as foreign-funded “radical groups,” Battershill spent the lion’s share of the interview urging listeners to mobilize in response:

Call your MP today. It doesn’t matter what party they’re with. […] On our website, we have an email we sent out today asking everyone to call the Prime Minister’s office. Call [then natural resources minister] Jim Carr’s office. Go on social media. We have to apply the pressure. […] I would encourage people to be vocal. Email the mayor of Burnaby. Email [BC premier] John Horgan’s office. Call their offices. Let’s flood the phonelines. Let’s flood their inboxes. Let’s stand up.

Listeners were invited to participate in a Vancouver Sun public-opinion poll regarding a proposal by the BC government to study and possibly restrict bitumen exports given the risk. Above all, he implored the audience to become active in communicating about this issue within their social networks: “We all have an opportunity to call friends and family. Use social media. Share Oil Sands Action, Canada Action. […] We are all on the same team. We all need to be working together to make sure that Canada, Alberta, we are all getting the best price for our oil.”

“Our oil.” Battershill’s interview—and the success of his campaigns in attracting social media support—exemplify what we describe as extractive populism, an emerging effort to position extractivism as under attack from elites, as an economic and political project that demands popular mobilization to defend, and as a democratic expression of the public will to fight for an industry that serves the common good. The term “extractive populist” has been invoked to characterize the political economy of Latin American states that rely upon extractive royalties to fund public services (Eisenstadt, Leon, and Wong 2017). Our application of the term pursues a markedly different ideological endeavour: to recruit and mobilize supporters of the (primarily North American) fossil fuel industry to counter what Naomi Klein (2014) has dubbed “Blockadia”—that is, growing regional resistance from environmental organizations, Indigenous groups, and local communities to the expansion of extractivism and associated infrastructure, such as pipelines. We situate this extractive populist discourse as both derivative of and complementary to contemporary forms of conservative populism that position “ordinary people” as the victims of a powerful minority of liberal elites who use their control over political and cultural institutions to impose their values upon society at large (Frank 2004; Gunster and Saurette 2014; Saurette and Gunster 2011).

Such discourse is frequently dubbed “astroturf,” a pejorative moniker implying top-down corporate public relations campaigns that simulate “grassroots” advocacy but with minimal linkages to real communities. Corporations do engage in such campaigns, and it is essential to explore their use of this strategy. Yet we believe that simply dismissing all industry-driven populist initiatives as “astroturf” underestimates the extent to which extractive populism genuinely resonates with (and amplifies) selective aspects of the world views and experiences of particular communities, especially those with significant ties to extractive industries. Such dismissals not only risk reinforcing populist narratives that accuse liberal elites of refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of perspectives other than their own but also fail to recognize the potential of such campaigns to affirm, reinforce, and combine with more political forms of populism. Analyzing the authoritarian populism of Thatcherism, Stuart Hall (1988, 46) once cautioned that “the first thing to ask about an ‘organic’ ideology that, however unexpectedly, succeeds in organizing substantial sections of the masses and mobilizing them for political action, is not what is false about it but what about it is true. By ‘true’ I do not mean universally correct … but ‘makes good sense.’” We believe that extractive populism deserves equally serious treatment.

Instead of characterizing these campaigns as astroturf, we find Edward Walker’s (2014) conception of subsidized publics a more useful framework for analyzing such corporate-led civic engagement. Subsidized publics arise from the use of industry resources to catalyze and refine the participation of particular groups within the public sphere, thereby giving them a coherence, focus, and elevated profile that they would not have on their own. Walker traces the origin of such practices to the growth of business/trade associations that work on behalf of an entire sector: “As business became more aware of its political interests—especially in response to the crisis of corporate legitimacy starting in the late 1960s—industry groups utilized the services of grassroots firms in order to connect with the broader public and activate their stakeholders” (74). Such publics frequently serve as a form of elite legitimation, exacerbating existing political inequalities between those groups favoured with such subsidies and those who lack such political sponsorship. But such legitimation proceeds via active efforts to articulate corporate and popular interests rather than through the orchestration of democratic simulacra that conjure mass sentiments out of thin air.

The discourse of extractive populism is an ideal fit for the explosive growth of social media platforms as increasingly dominant venues for news consumption and public communication. An August 2016 survey conducted by Abacus Data found that the number of Canadians who rely on social media as a primary source of news and information had more than doubled since 2015, and Facebook had become the leading source for those under forty-five years of age. A report on the findings characterized Facebook as “a dynamic platform that many Canadians use to consume content, share their thoughts and comment on other people’s posts. It’s an interactive ecosystem ripe for political discussion and persuasion. A place where public affairs professionals can speak to a broad group of citizens or to a very specific argument” (Blevis and Coletto 2017). Unlike traditional corporate public relations, over which a company exercises control, speaking directly to its audience, extractive populism depends upon the active mediation, curation, and circulation of material through social networks. The hermeneutic labour signified through posting, sharing, liking, and commenting on specific pieces of media occludes the institutional origins and authority of extractivist discourse, dynamically repositioning it as a form of “common sense” emerging organically from the collective wisdom of communities of like-minded people. In this process, pro-industry ideas and arguments originally produced by elite sources (such as public relations firms, think tanks, and the editorial boards of newspapers and magazines) are rechristened as populist—that is, reflective of and emerging from “the people”—as they pass through social media circuits.

In what follows, we trace the contours of extractive populism as it is increasingly expressed in Canadian social media. First, we explore the genesis of Canadian extractive populism in industry’s efforts to target and “activate” key constituencies of supporters to emulate the successes of their opponents’ communication and engagement strategies. Following a description of our research, we dig deeper into the strategies of several Facebook groups that represent key nodes in the promotional infrastructure for extractive populism, focusing on the material they are sharing and how they are (re)framing extractivism.

The Shift: Subsidizing Canadian “Energy Citizens”

In “Energy’s Citizens: The Making of a Canadian Petro-Public,” Tim Wood notes that CAPP first explored the idea of civic engagement in the wake of internal-opinion surveys about a decade ago that found industry employees were reluctant to participate in public debates around the oil and gas sector. He quotes Jeff Gaulin, vice-president of communications at CAPP, as saying that people who might otherwise support the fossil fuel industry “felt it was like smoking. You were socially stigmatized to stand up and defend the oil sands or natural gas or pipelines” (quoted in Wood 2018, 11). The rapid expansion of production in the Alberta oil sands, combined with high-profile “accidents” such as the death of sixteen hundred migratory birds in Syncrude tailings ponds in 2008, had significantly elevated the industry’s profile in Canadian media. Faced with increasing public scrutiny of its environmental and social impacts, industry sought to make its employees more active partners in championing the virtues of oil and gas development.

Cenovus, among the most aggressive firms in using advertising campaigns to shape public opinion (Turner 2012), was the first to engage its workforce, in October 2013, with the distribution of “wearable pride in the form of ‘I ⋡ Oil’ T-shirts, toques, and ear-warming headbands; a ‘Speak Up’ package with tips, examples and industry facts all designed to encourage (or support) conversations with friends and family; and an update to the company’s social media guidelines designed to encourage greater participation in online discussions and debates” (Stanfield 2015, 9). The following year, CAPP launched Canada’s Energy Citizens, a hybrid marketing and engagement strategy designed to showcase public support for the sector and encourage ordinary Canadians—especially employees and their families—to become vocal industry advocates. In April 2015, this new emphasis on targeted engagement was profiled in a special issue of Context, CAPP’s member magazine: “CAPP is building toward a full-blown grassroots outreach program that will begin to take shape in the coming months. The goal will be to shift industry supporters from a mode of passive endorsement to active engagement” (Stanfield 2015, 10). “We know the support is out there,” explained Christina Pilarski, CAPP’s campaign manager. “We’ve made some good progress in identifying that support. The next step is to build relationships with our supporters, and inspire them to become visible and vocal champions for industry” (quoted in Stanfield 2015, 10). Industry polling suggested that while strong supporters of industry outnumbered strong opponents two to one, supporters felt too uncomfortable and embarrassed to speak out in favour of an industry that had allegedly been so effectively demonized by a vocal minority (Hislop 2015). The Canada’s Energy Citizens campaign aimed to embolden supporters, assuring them that their views were valid, broadly shared, and essential to express.

Anxiety about the power, skill, and determination of environmentalist opposition looms large in industry accounts explaining the shift from conventional public relations—prioritizing mass-market ad campaigns and information subsidies to corporate media—to a movement-based model of advocacy. Environmental organizations were perceived as far more effective campaigners in using social media to deliver values-driven, emotional appeals aimed at mobilizing small but motivated constituencies to become active participants in public debates. In an October 2014 speech, for example, CAPP’s then president, David Collyer, observed that “high-priced advertising could nudge the needle of public opinion in the industry’s favor, but a well-timed counterpunch from opponents on social media would almost always push it right back. In the new age of handheld-to-handheld combat, oil and gas was getting badly outflanked” (quoted in Coyne 2015). Industry therefore had little choice but to adopt its opponents’ tactics, reconceptualizing social media as a space where supporters could envision themselves as part of a broader political movement.

While CAPP primarily describes its Canada’s Energy Citizens initiative as stimulating more balanced conversations about energy in everyday life, assembling a network of impassioned supporters schooled in the necessity of political action (for example, participating in public consultations, pressuring politicians) has been a core program objective. In April 2015, CAPP invited Deryck Spooner, senior director of external mobilization for the American Petroleum Institute (API), to come to Calgary to discuss API’s own “Energy Citizens” campaign. Titled “Harnessing Passion Through Grassroots,” Spooner’s presentation opened with a frank acknowledgement of industry’s desire to drive its supporters to “take to the streets” in the same way as its opponents (Spooner 2015, 4). Building such support, he explained, involved a three-stage process—”recruit,” “educate and train,” and “motivate and activate”—to be implemented through various online and offline venues including town halls and rallies, social media, letters to the editor, petitions, and lobbying of elected officials. The program aimed to build “key, long-term ally relationships” based upon “the principle that conditioned allies are likely to be better advocates” (19; emphasis in the original). Three different constituencies were identified as priorities: “local influentials” (small business owners, community leaders, media), “industry voices” (companies, pro-industry think tanks), and “energy voters” (rank-and-file constituents, industry employees) (19). Subsequent slides described the millions of supporters cultivated by API who could duly be “activated” to pressure politicians and local and state governments to support industry objectives. The presentation concluded with three examples in which such mobilization produced tangible results: first, generating over 120,000 comments in support of an LNG export facility in Maryland, which helped to win an uphill battle to secure regulatory approval; second, defeating a “Community Bill of Rights” in Youngstown, Ohio, that would have constrained local oil and gas development; and third, defeating a “Waterfront Protection Ordinance” in South Portland, Maine, that would have banned bitumen exports from the harbour.

Advocates and supporters have also developed their own social media campaigns to defend the Canadian oil and gas industry. Officially, these supporter groups claim to operate at arm’s length from industry, although the extent to which they receive support is an ongoing question (Linnitt and Gutstein 2015). Over the past several years, Cody Battershill’s Oil Sands Action and Canada Action have attracted hundreds of thousands of followers on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms. Battershill—a regular contributor to the Huffington Post who occasionally pens op-eds in the Calgary Herald—has indicated that his activism emerged out of frustration with the anti–oil sands messaging of environmental groups as well as the ineffectiveness of the oil industry’s response. In his perception, wrote National Post commentator Claudia Cattaneo (2015), “industry’s own efforts have been hampered by too little co-ordination, too many unchallenged claims, and industry leaders censoring themselves from what needed to be said.” More recently, similar groups have appeared on the scene: Oil Sands Strong, Oilfield Dads, Albertans Against the NDP, and Alberta Proud combine a relentless advocacy of extractivism as a Canadian public good with caustic attacks on industry critics. They are playing a key role in building a more robust and differentiated promotional field around the fossil fuel sector that is especially well suited to the compartmentalized echo chambers of social media.

The Seven Groups in Our Sample

On the basis of an initial review of pro-industry social media, we selected seven Canadian Facebook groups that are broadly representative of four different types of organizations—corporations, industry engagement groups, supporter/activist groups, and elite advocacy groups—involved in social media extractivist advocacy. First, we identified Cenovus and Enbridge as two of the most active corporations on social media; both companies have also spearheaded significant advertising and public relations campaigns to build public support for the sector. Second, we selected CAPP’s Canada’s Energy Citizens (CEC), as well as Oil Respect (OR), the engagement initiative of the Canadian Association of Oilwell Drilling Contractors, an Alberta-based industry organization representing small and medium enterprises. Third, we identified Oil Sands Action (OSA), headed by Battershill, and Oil Sands Strong (OSS), founded and run by Robbie Picard—an oil and gas worker from Fort McMurray—as two of the most popular industry-oriented supporter groups on Facebook. Finally, Resource Works (RW), a BC-based policy and advocacy organization promoting resource development, was selected as a more traditional lobby group that is active on social media.

Table 7.1 compares the level and growth in group likes for these seven pages with the profiles of some of the most popular Canadian and BC environmental organizations to illustrate the relative size and reach of industry-friendly social media communications. As the table illustrates, both CEC and OSA have attracted a sizable number of followers, comparable to Greenpeace Canada, though still many fewer than the David Suzuki Foundation, the largest Canadian environmental organization on Facebook. OR and OSS possess a smaller but still significant social media footprint, with RW and the two corporations attracting less attention. With the exception of RW, the growth in group likes has been very strong for all of the industry advocacy groups and is generally much higher than those for many environmental groups.

Note: In 2018, group likes were all collected on the same day (February 23). In 2017, the collections for the various groups were made on several different days spanning roughly a two-week period (January 30 to February 15).

Using NVivo, we scraped data about our seven groups’ 2016 posts to explore the volume of content they were generating as well as their level of engagement with Facebook users. This generated a total sample of 3,725 posts. As table 7.2 illustrates, uneven patterns of posting and audience engagement were visible among the groups.

^a Oil Respect launched on February 11, 2016; thus, the sample does not include a full year of posts.

During 2016, the seven groups generated a total of 3,723 posts. Cenovus and Enbridge were the least active, with less than one post every two days, and they attracted comparatively few likes, shares, and comments. RW had a much higher volume of posts, but, like the corporations, it struggled to attract audience engagement. Conversely, the two industry engagement groups, CEC and OR, and the two supporter/activist groups, OSA and OSS, were much more successful in generating engagement. We incorporate these different levels of engagement in our analysis through a measure called the composite engagement metric (CEM), which adds together likes, shares, and comments to provide a quantitative weighting for each post based on the engagement it generated. A post with one like, one share, and one comment has a CEM of 3, while a post with ten likes, ten shares, and ten comments has a CEM of 30; the second post would be assigned a weighting ten times larger than the first.

We then calculated each group’s share of the total number of posts (prior to weighting) and of the total CEM score for the seven groups (see table 7.3). Once engagement metrics are taken into account, CEC and OSA emerge as clearly dominant, accounting for over 80 percent of total engagement, while OR and OSS attracted much smaller but still significant levels of interest from Facebook users. However, posts from RW and the two corporations generated only minimal engagement.

Accordingly, we focused our analysis on a smaller sample of items consisting of all 2016 posts (a total of 2,165) from the top four groups—CEC, OR, OSA, and OSS—which accounted for 98.7 percent of engagement in the total sample. We coded each post for two variables: the type of content and its primary frame, that is, the dominant theme of the post.¹ In the case of posts that contained links to external content (such as an article in the National Post), we included the source of the content and its author in our analysis, but we did not code the linked material itself.

Types of Posts and an Analysis of Frames

Types and Sources of Posts

Social media platforms such as Facebook are primarily used to circulate and share content among social networks, but the content itself is naturally diverse. We coded posts (including the source and author of linked content, if any) for fourteen different types of content, as described in table 7.4.

The distribution of types for each of the four groups is shown in table 7.5. Sharing favourable content from mainstream media and the trade press was a clear priority for both industry association groups: 42.2 percent of CEC posts and 46.8 percent of OR posts consisted of material produced by news organizations. In contrast, the two supporter/activist groups emphasized the circulation of memes, which occupied close to half of CEC’s posts and almost 80 percent for OSS. Memes were especially effective in generating user engagement, accounting for close to 40 percent of engagement across the four groups.

Virtually all memes circulated by these groups were self-produced, prominently branded with group names and logos, and served to communicate industry-friendly arguments and claims in a simplistic, highly accessible, and often memorable style. Indeed, we argue that one of the core functions of these groups is meme labour, that is, the ideological and rhetorical work of mining news media, trade publications, industry public relations, and think-tank research for ideas, images, and soundbites that can be circulated quickly and easily, inviting audiences to actively confirm pro-industry world views by liking and sharing memes. One of the most popular memes in the sample, for example, asserted, “I’m a Canadian. I have the right to choose! So why can’t I choose Canadian oil over Saudi Arabia oil!” (OSS, January 30). (All posts date to 2016.) Produced by OSS—with a graphic that urges readers to “help us reach our goal of 100,000 likes!”—the meme received 7,500 likes and nearly 30,000 shares. While one might justifiably criticize such a blatant misrepresentation of how individual consumers intersect with global energy markets, it offers the stark and compelling proposition of celebrating Canadian values by choosing “our oil” over imports from authoritarian regimes.

Memes offer a condensation of core factoids, arguments, and values that enable audiences to easily understand the world and their relation to it: “Another foreign oil tanker on the East Coast. Where are the protesters?” (OSA, September 1, 16K shares); “Canada is oil rich, and imports 736,000 barrels of oil every day. Energy East can fix that” (CEC, March 3, 10K shares); “Share if you think Leo [DiCaprio] should stop lecturing you about your carbon footprint” (OSA, November 1, 6K shares); “77% of Canadians surveyed support the Trans Mountain pipeline” (CEC, November 4, 4K shares). In 2016, OSA posted over three hundred memes, close to one per day (often adding additional memes in the comments section), providing Battershill with not only a constant supply of feedback about the comparative efficacy of different arguments but also a steady accumulation of extractivist agitprop that can easily be recycled as required depending upon circumstances and events. Such memes furnish the core ingredients of an extractivist-oriented world view that is simple, self-evident, and appealing to many, helping inoculate readers against countervailing arguments and evidence, and hardening views about energy politics.

Self-generated content was the largest source of material for all four groups: 33.2 percent for CEC, 41.7 percent for OR, 72.9 percent for OSA, and 92.8 percent for OSS. Overall, 57.6 percent of the posts in the total sample were produced by one of the four groups or parent organizations.

The most significant external sources of content shared by these groups were news and commentary from corporate media and the trade press, accounting for over 70 percent of all such external links. Given the well-documented tendency of Postmedia to offer sympathetic coverage of the industry (see, for example, Gunster and Neubauer 2018; Gunster and Saurette 2014), as well as the conglomerate’s dominance of English-language Canadian print media, it was unsurprising to find that articles, columns, and op-eds from Postmedia papers constituted almost one-half of all links to mainstream, trade, and alternative media items. Figure 7.1 illustrates the top fifteen sources of links to news sources in the sample. The National Post and the Calgary Herald lead the list, with Postmedia papers constituting seven of the top fifteen sources. Also noteworthy, however, was the high volume of links to the CBC, an organization often maligned by conservatives as possessing a left-wing, anti–fossil fuel bias (for example, Cross 2014) yet one that supplied a range of news and commentary that clearly fit with these groups’ pro-extractivist bias. Indeed, when posts are weighted according to audience engagement, the CBC constituted the top source in the sample. A January 2016 Rick Mercer “rant” railing against Canadians who accept equalization payments but are not willing to support the Energy East pipeline was the highest weighted post in the entire sample—shared by OSA, it generated nearly 45,000 likes and over 62,000 shares (the video was also posted by CEC, attracting over 5,000 likes and almost 5,000 shares).

Another surprising finding was the prominence of news media that have little profile in the broader public sphere but loom large in pro-industry social media. The online BOE Report, for instance, was founded in 2013 by Josh Groberman, a former traffic helicopter pilot from Calgary. It primarily serves up industry-oriented business news, yet it also regularly publishes pro-extractivism commentary. It claimed that over 1.4 million users visited the site in 2016, including a core user base of fifty thousand oil and gas sector employees from Calgary (BOE Report Staff 2017).

One of the BOE Report’s proudest accomplishments was a piece by Terry Etam, a Calgary-based oil and gas consultant, which it published on January 25, 2016. Titled “Saudi Oil Filling a New Brunswick Refinery—What Kind of Domestic Energy Policy Is That?” (Etam 2016), the piece made the case for Energy East by decrying the seeming absurdity of importing oil from Saudi Arabia to service a Canadian refinery that could be processing Alberta oil. Both CEC and OSA promoted the piece on the day it was posted, generating close to 6,000 shares that drove traffic to the site and attracted attention to the argument. Two weeks later, columnist Claudia Cattaneo (2016) wrote a piece that recycled Etam’s arguments, probably hoping to capitalize on the social media buzz that CEC and OSA had helped to create. Both OSA and CEC then immediately shared Cattaneo’s column (OSA, February 9; CEC, February 10), generating over 4,000 likes and 3,500 shares between them. A week later, OSA posted a meme referring to both the Etam piece and a second National Post story on the same theme, which generated a further 1,200 likes and almost 1,300 shares (OSA, February 18). At the end of the year, OSA pitched Etam’s piece a final time, attracting 4,000 likes and almost 5,000 shares (OSA, December 29). The BOE Report described Etam’s piece as its most widely read and circulated story of 2016, boasting that it had been shared over 50,000 times (BOE Report Staff 2017). Together, CEC and OSA posts and memes about the Etam article in 2016 generated 12,800 shares and were likely responsible for a significant proportion of the attention it ultimately received.

Frames

We also coded for the presence of seventeen primary frames, described in table 7.6. As mentioned earlier, a single primary frame was coded for each post. Given that posts often contained more than one frame, we used a sequence of coding based upon four tiers of priority. In posts containing memes, infographics, photos, and videos, coding priority was assigned to the embedded image or visual (with the first thirty seconds used for videos). In the case of posts that contained embedded links, coding priority was assigned to the text preceding the embedded link. If such text contained multiple frames, the most prominent frame, as defined by the number of sentences, was selected. If multiple frames had equivalent amounts of text, the frame in the highest tier (see table 7.6) was selected. If multiple frames in the same tier were equally present, the frame appearing first was selected. In posts without prefatory text, the embedded visual was coded.

Two dominant frames in the sample—the representation of extractivism as a Canadian public good and attacking fossil fuel industry opponents—accounted for close to 40 percent of all posts (see table 7.7). Additional prominent frames included public support, ethical oil, mobilizing support, technologically-driven/corporate sustainability, and self-promotion. Comparing the proportion of posts (“Posts”) to the proportion of engagement (“CEM”) illustrates how different frames generated varying levels of engagement both in the overall sample and within particular groups: overall, Canadian public interest, attacks on opponents, energy lifeworld, ethical oil, and efforts to mobilize supporters produced strong levels of engagement, while public support and especially self-promotion were less successful (with some notable differences between groups).

Figures 7.2 and 7.3 provide a visual representation of the relative prominence of the significant frames in the sample. (CSR, resource history, and low-carbon transition are not included owing to their low frequency), the comparative significance of each group in mobilizing different frames, and differences between these groups’ posting and engagement patterns. In the remainder of this section, we explore the most prominent frames in more detail to flesh out the vision of extractive populism developed in these groups.

The Canadian public interest frame primarily emphasized the economic benefits of the fossil fuel industry to the country, including economic growth, employment, and taxation revenue. These benefits were described both abstractly, through statistics, and concretely, through allusions to the many Canadian families who depend upon the sector. In the latter case, the interactivity of social media was often leveraged to reinforce perceptions of collective dependence upon the sector while positioning this dependence as a source of national pride. For example, one meme featured an image of an oil pump set against an iconic backdrop of snow-capped mountains and invited readers, “Share if Canadian oil put food on your table” (CEC, July 11). The post was shared over fifteen thousand times.

Elsewhere, this process has been described as a form of symbolic nationalization (Gunster and Saurette 2014) in which a thoroughly capitalist enterprise organized to profit private corporations and shareholders is depicted as if it were a public endeavour that had been nationalized, oriented around serving the interests of citizens and the common good. Such a rhetorical strategy is profoundly hypocritical given the bitter and strenuous opposition of industry (and many of its supporters) to any attempt by federal and provincial governments to increase the public’s share of revenues from the sector or reduce the negative ecological and health impacts of bitumen extraction and processing (Gunster and Saurette 2014).

These groups filled their social media with signifiers of Canadian national identity to make the case that oil and gas development is intrinsically Canadian. Posts referenced iconic events, places, people, activities, and objects designed to invoke national pride and then graft these sentiments on to the fossil fuel sector. A strong performance by Team Canada at the Olympics, a national holiday, Vimy Ridge Day—these groups used any and all opportunities to fuse pride in Canada with pride in extractivism. This is symbolic and emotional terrain that these groups worked hard to claim as their own, advancing the case that a healthy oil and gas sector is itself part of what makes “us” Canadian (Barney 2017).

While this frame was generally celebratory and upbeat, it was at its most emotionally resonant when conveying stories of loss and hardship. OR’s feed, in particular, was filled with posts emphasizing the lived experiences of unemployed workers harmed by a sectoral downtown that was framed as having predominantly political origins, namely, excessive regulation and the government’s failure to facilitate pipeline expansion rather than the boom-and-bust cycle of global commodity markets and layoffs imposed by corporations. “More and more Canadians losing their jobs, homes and businesses,” lamented one OR post, “while shovel ready projects sit waiting, and carbon levies and corporate taxes chase investment away” (OR, July 30). Pitting employment against environmental protection has long been a staple of pro-industry communication (Beder 2002), but the populist trope of standing up for embattled working-class families was a striking characteristic of this communication.

The public opinion/support frame recalls a key claim underlying CAPP’s engagement initiatives: that most Canadians support oil and gas development but have been effectively silenced by a small but vocal minority of opponents. These groups advance this claim by highlighting sympathetic media stories that give play to the “silent majority” argument (for instance, “Chilliwack farmer says he’s among silent majority in favour of oil pipelines,” CEC, February 25) and trumpeting polls showing support for projects. Such posts not only aspire to legitimate oil and gas advocacy as representative of what most “ordinary” Canadians desire but also set the stage for a populist David and Goliath narrative, in which a naïve and helpless industry (and its employees) are victims of biased media that largely showcases opposition to extractivism.

One of the most distinctive elements of this frame are photos of people—both celebrities and non-celebrities—proudly wearing “I ⋡ oil sands” merchandise. OSA and OSS showcased athletes from the Calgary Flames and the Calgary Stampeders displaying their apparent love for pipelines, oil sands, and Canadian energy (for example, OSA, January 22, February 25, and May 23). Several posts showed NDP MLAs from Alberta wearing OSA merchandise, including a well-travelled photo of then Alberta premier Rachel Notley posing with OSS founder Picard (OSA, March 4), implying that supporting industry ought to be viewed as a bipartisan cause.

Groups also sought to mobilize supporters to take specific actions: this was the third most engaging frame in the sample and especially prevalent in CEC posts. Readers were asked to contact elected officials to express support for projects, write letters to the editor, call in to talk shows, and participate in public hearings. The spectre of industry opponents dominating public reviews was invoked regularly. “You only have two days left!” warned an OR post linking to a survey from Natural Resources Canada. “So don’t let radical environmentalists monopolize the TransMountain Expansion pipeline questionnaire. Have your say on Canadian jobs and natural resources” (OR, September 28).

Alongside calls to action were stories about “ordinary” Canadians engaged in the movement, helping to give supporters a sense of their collective power and responsibility to intervene in public debates around industry. Supporters were addressed not simply as individuals who benefit from or support resource development but as members of a collective movement whose actions (or inaction) would determine their community’s future. At one level, this rhetoric serves the instrumental goal of getting people to do things. But it also aims to redefine extractivism as itself emerging from the democratic will of a social movement (and not corporate power and special interests). If enough supporters mobilized, the payoff would be government decisions such as the federal approval of the Trans Mountain Expansion project, portrayed as emanating from the activism of Canadian “energy citizens.”

Failure to mobilize would abandon public and policy-making spheres to liberal elites and radical activists devoted to ending Canadian resource development. Measured in terms of both frequency and engagement, the attack on opponents frame was the second most prominent in the sample, accounting for just under 20 percent of overall posts and engagement. Fear-mongering about environmental groups and demonizing of industry opponents were pervasive in all four groups but especially dominant (and often intensely personalized and caustic) in OR and OSA. Actor and environmental advocate Leonardo DiCaprio was a favourite target because he enabled the symbolic condensation of all the negative attributes of industry critics into a single figure. Such criticism, the argument goes, is invariably rooted in wealthy, foreign, fear-mongering celebrities and elite organizations that attack Canada’s industry while ignoring other producers or the role of consumer demand. Industry opponents were ridiculed as being ill informed about Canadian operations and hostile to the fate of Canadian workers. The storyline of Canada—or, more particularly, Alberta—as under attack from outside interests played extremely well for these groups and resonates with long-standing Alberta tropes of western alienation.

Canadian environmental organizations and activists generally received less attention than foreign celebrities and groups, presumably to avoid drawing attention to the fact that there are many within the country (even within Alberta) critical of how industry operates and is (or is not) regulated. Canadian environmentalists were consistently denigrated as “paid protesters,” with posts framing domestic environmental NGOs as little more than the lackeys of wealthy US foundations, thereby positioning criticism itself as a foreign import. The arguments of commentator Vivian Krause that “the anti-pipeline machine is a ‘directed, network campaign,’ a new breed of professional, staged activism” (OSA, October 4) received much attention. Environmentalists were unequivocally presented as objects of ridicule and outrage who are either naïve and ill informed or as misanthropic, dangerous hypocrites who care little about workers, their families, and the broader Canadian economy. One post, a photo of smiling staff members from Greenpeace Canada, was prefaced with the assertion “Getting paid good money spreading misinformation while hurting Canadian family’s [sic]!” (OSS, March 4). Industry critics appeared not as political opponents with whom one negotiates but instead as devious political enemies whose ideas and actions represent an existential threat to Canadian prosperity.

Both the ethical oil and energy lifeworld frames reinforced the argument that criticism of Canada’s fossil fuel industry is unfair and irrational. The ethical oil frame—originally popularized by conservative activist and Rebel Media founder Ezra Levant—defined global energy markets as offering a stark choice between authoritarian oil-producing regimes and a democratic Canada that respects human rights, the rule of law, and strong environmental regulation. “I want to know that the oil used in my car was not generated using slave labour in a country without a free press,” one pro-industry blogger declared. “I want my oil being produced by well-paid Canadians in a country with a demonstrably free press, strong government oversight and a strong tradition of NGOs to watch over the regulator’s shoulder” (OSA, January 30).

The ubiquity of oil in everyday life was the focus of the energy lifeworld frame. Although it played a comparatively small role in the sample as a primary frame, the theme was often present in posts that attacked opponents as hypocrites for condemning an industry that enabled their quality of life. A cartoon from the American Energy Alliance caricaturing a nude divestment protester’s alarm once stripped of his oil-based clothing and accessories—presented as “an oldie but a goodie” by CEC—was shared over six thousand times (CEC, October 6). The most widely circulated item in the entire sample was a 2010 ad from Occidental Petroleum that likewise dramatized the shock of a suburban man experiencing the sudden disappearance of petroleum-based products from his life: it was shared nearly 77,000 times (OSA, December 12). Beyond the invocation of hypocrisy, such stark “life with oil” versus “life without oil” binaries helped shift discussion of extractivism out of the realm of politics and policy (where industry is vulnerable) and into the sphere of everyday life and personal consumption, in which it becomes so much harder to envision individually reducing one’s fossil fuel dependence.

A final frame worth discussing given its emerging public significance is Indigenous nations. In contrast to their relentless denunciation of environmentalist opponents of the industry, these groups were almost entirely silent about Indigenous resistance to extractivism. CEC and OR, closely connected to key industry lobby groups and probably concerned about accusations of racism, were especially quiet on this topic, with fewer than ten posts between them (out of a total of more than twelve hundred). Recognition of Indigenous criticism would also have posed a serious narrative threat to storylines that emphasize the benefits to all of fossil fuel development, an unmitigated celebration of Canadian nationalism, and the demonization of opposition as foreign. Perhaps exploiting their greater rhetorical autonomy, OSA and OSS challenged conventional associations of Indigenous groups (especially First Nations) with opposition, instead arguing that most Indigenous people were themselves part of a silent majority of industry supporters and beneficiaries. The views of pro-industry Indigenous spokespeople such as Fort McKay Chief Jim Boucher and Métis Nation BC president Bruce Dumont were showcased, as were the sentiments of “ordinary” Indigenous supporters. Relevant memes celebrated the revenues from oil sands operations accruing to Indigenous businesses and suggested that Indigenous support for oil and gas development was much more widespread than opposition.

Conclusion

Given ongoing debates surrounding social media, populist discourse, and the polarization of Canadian energy politics, it is tempting to brush off extractive populism as “astroturf” or deride it as “fake news.” Such dismissals, we argue, should be resisted insofar as they misrecognize the cultural and ideological force of these groups’ political communications and strategy. A more urgent task is to understand how the skillful but partial assemblage of factual raw material by these groups constructs a world view that is simultaneously compelling and pernicious. The selective mining, framing, circulation, and amplification of decontextualized factoids has subsidized the formation of online and offline publics encouraged to (re)conceptualize extractivism not only as serving the public good but also as a fragile project that depends on political mobilization to save it from the insidious efforts of powerful, well-funded industry opponents.

Canadian extractive populism rests upon the presumption that all Canadians—as workers, as taxpayers, as consumers—benefit extensively, and equally, from fossil fuel development. The relentless circulation, via social media, of exaggerated claims and decontextualized statistics about royalties, equalization payments, and employment obscures the rationale for widespread regional opposition to projects such as Northern Gateway, Kinder Morgan, and Energy East. The groups who indulge in pro-industry rhetoric fail to mention, for example, that the vast majority of economic benefits from these projects would accrue to predominantly corporate actors outside the provinces where they would be built. Such narratives also belie how Indigenous and coastal communities, taxpayers, and workers would be forced to absorb the majority of ecological and economic risk from a spill or leak (Hoberg 2013). The inequities baked into these projects mirror the much deeper inequality that structures the oil sands industry in toto, in which low royalty and taxation rates, high capital intensity, and low employment intensity generate large corporate profits, comparatively modest (and unpredictable) state revenues, and a boom-and-bust cycle that provides little employment security to workers (Campanella 2012). Such a disproportionate allocation of benefits is hardly surprising within a regional political economy that has become subservient to the international oil industry (Adkin and Miller 2016), a condition that former Alberta provincial Liberal leader Kevin Taft (2017) has described as oil’s “deep state.”

In a similar vein, the conspiratorial depiction of industry criticism as emanating from a small number of foreign-funded and -controlled elite organizations both ignores and delegitimizes the broad popularity and grassroots organization of resistance to new pipeline and tanker projects in British Columbia, Québec, and other regions across Canada (Hoberg 2013). While some Indigenous leaders and communities are partners in resource extraction on their territories, such arguments willfully obscure the long history of Alberta First Nations opposing oil sands development in their traditional territories (Audette-Longo 2018). And they neglect the fierce opposition of many West Coast Indigenous communities to pipeline and tanker projects such as Northern Gateway or the Trans Mountain expansion.

Identifying and challenging the inaccuracies and omissions that constitute the monochromatic portrait of the fossil fuel industry offered by extractive populism is an essential task. We argue, however, that such critical work depends upon a substantive engagement with how and why extractive populism has begun to empower and motivate what industry sees as its natural constituency, transforming alienated workers and other pro-industry individuals into an engaged petro-public that can forcefully advocate for the sector in social media, everyday life, and the public sphere. Taking such groups seriously requires moving beyond simply dismissing them as astroturf or peddlers of fake news. The strength of these groups lies predominantly in their capacity to strategically cull and repurpose information from a wide variety of sources so as to generate compelling narratives that distort and misrepresent the structure of, degree of public support for, and negative externalities of the industry. Those seeking to build the political will for a rapid transition away from an extractivist economy would do well to think seriously about what makes these narratives attractive and how to develop compelling alternative visions organized around democracy, social justice, and sustainability.

Note

1. Intercoder reliability was measured through Krippendorff’s alpha coefficient, based on coding a random selection of one hundred items from the sample. It was assessed at 0.894 for the post type variable and 0.877 for the primary frame variable, well above the 0.8 threshold normally required for consistency in content analysis (Krippendorff 2004). All posts in the smaller sample were also qualitatively analyzed by the first author to identify dominant themes, rhetorical strategies, and patterns of representation.