For much of the last decade, a not insignificant number of Canadians have become engrossed in a peculiar conspiracy theory. It goes something like this: U.S. philanthropic organizations have paid Canadian environmental groups to hire anti-pipeline protesters, sapping support for Canada’s oil and gas industry. As such, pipelines have not been built, and Canada’s vast energy resources remain landlocked and inaccessible, denying the country an incredible fortune.
If it were true, this would be the most effective environmental protest movement in world history. A handful of demonstrations by a few thousand protesters would have managed to hamstring an industry that’s responsible for about 11 percent of Canada’s nominal GDP and that, just a couple years ago, directly employed nearly 300,000 people. The theory—almost exclusively promoted by Canadian conservatives—asks its believers to imagine a world where all it takes to cripple an industry backed by multinational energy companies and valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars are a few protests, some bad public relations, and the postponement or cancellation of a few pipelines.
