Follow the Money? The Anti Alberta Oil Lobby
Club Members must purchase tickets for this event through the link provided on The Club Hub.
At The Financial Post, they call Vivian the girl who played with tax data and uncovered the foreign funding of Canadian green groups. But it wasn't always this way...
Born in Vancouver, she is a B.C. girl at heart. As a child she lived in Kitimat. Her father taught at Kildala Elementary School. Her family eventually moved to Kamloops where she finished high school at Westsyde Secondary. After a few years at community college and U.B.C., she went back east for a B.Sc. from McGill University. Her major was Nutrition. She also has a Masters of Science from l'Université of Montréal.
During the 1990s, she worked for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) on programs for maternal and infant nutrition in Guatemala (1990-1995) and Indonesia (1996-2000). She also did some food aid planning for the U.N. High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). Before that, she worked with Algonquin people to prevent diabetes in their communities in the north part of Quebec.
During 2002 and 2003, she was Corporate Development Manager for North America for NUTRECO, one of the world's largest producers of farmed salmon and fish feed.
In 2006, she prepared a submission to the Special Committee on Sustainable Aquaculture of the B.C. Government. While preparing that submission, she unexpectedly came across a grant for an "antifarming campaign" with "science messages" and "earned media." When she raised questions about this grant from the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, four grants for a multi-million dollar campaign against salmon farming were quietly re-written by the Moore foundation. While going through the tax returns of American charitable foundations to try and figure out who was funding the campaign against salmon farming, she happened to notice many grants for a "Tar Sands Campaign". That's when she started to write about the campaign against Alberta oil.
As she tried to take a look at the salmon farming controversy from a marketing perspective - a point of view that she missed when she worked in the industry - she wrote two papers about the so-called 'science' about PCBs in farmed salmon, and sea lice - and the money behind it.
More recently, she has brought significant attention on how the Canadian energy industry is the target of a multi-million dollar campaign that explicitly aims to “land-lock” Canadian oil and gas, keeping Canada out of overseas markets. She also provides a practical, constructive roadmap for how industry can begin to deal with the activism that is targeted against it.