Campaign against B.C. chlorine plant was secretly funded by rival
Big money is trying to covertly influence local government, politicians say
This story is a collaboration between the Investigative Journalism Foundation (IJF) and CBC Vancouver.
An online lobbying campaign against a North Vancouver chemical plant is secretly funded by one of that company's competitors.
For months, the anonymous directors of the website "Keep North Vancouver Safe" have spent thousands of dollars trying to convince local elected officials to stop chlorine production at a facility run by Chemtrade Logistics Inc. in the District of North Vancouver.
The group's Facebook page describes it as a local "environmental conservation organization" concerned about the environmental and safety risks posed by a hypothetical chlorine spill.
But an IJF and CBC Vancouver investigation has found the campaign was created by a Toronto-based lobbying firm working for K2 Pure Solutions, a company co-founded by a former owner of the Toronto Argonauts. Chemtrade considers K2 to be a top competitor.
The campaign appears designed to foil Chemtrade's bid to renew a lease that would allow it to keep producing chlorine.
In June, social media users in the Lower Mainland began seeing advertisements from Keep North Vancouver Safe suggesting a chlorine disaster related to Chemtrade's North Vancouver plant is imminent.
One advertisement features a skull and crossbones and warns that "chlorine gas is invisible and can have severe health implications." Another, titled "Chlorine: A History of Danger," lists dates of chlorine disasters in North America and finishes with: "Vancouver, 20??."
Elected officials targeted by the campaign say it is an example of big money trying to covertly influence local politics.
"It's awful. It's a horrible feeling. It really is not fair," said District of North Vancouver Coun. Lisa Muri. She said K2 should have been transparent about its identity and intentions.
"It's not honest. And certainly, in this day of division and divisiveness in society and in politics, why do we want to perpetuate dishonesty?" Muri said.
K2 did not make a spokesperson available for an interview. Neither did Crestview Strategies, the public relations agency that created the website.
Senior Crestview consultant Jason Craik, a former staffer for ex-B.C. premier John Horgan, said in a written statement that the anonymous campaign was meant to "provide information to the residents of the District of North Vancouver" in response to Chemtrade's own public lobbying efforts.
K2 Pure Solutions co-founder David Cynamon, the former Argonauts owner, wrote in his own statement that the campaign was meant to "shed light on the behind-the-scenes activities by Chemtrade, and provide residents of North Vancouver with the facts, and let them decide whether they want to support the continued production and transport of chlorine in their community."
Cynamon did not directly answer a question about whether running the anonymous campaign was ethical.
Late Wednesday afternoon, Cynamon issued a statement apologizing for how K2 Pure Solutions ran the campaign. The statement was also publicly posted on the Keep North Vancouver Safe website.
"We sincerely apologize if our lack of transparency has caused mistrust, and we hope that this mistake does not distract from the facts of the matter," Cynamon said.
A quiet campaign
Crestview's campaign came at a decisive moment for Chemtrade.
The company's chemical plant in North Vancouver sits partially on land leased from the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority.
That plant, which employs roughly 120 people, has produced chlorine for more than 60 years under various owners.
The facility's current lease with the port authority, though, expires in 2030, when it will be required to stop making chlorine on port land.
Chemtrade is negotiating with the port authority to extend that lease and has lobbied all levels of government to secure their support.
Alan Robinson, the company's group vice-president, commercial, said the company plans to submit an application for safety upgrades to the District of North Vancouver council.
As of Sept. 6, the Meta Ad library estimates Keep North Vancouver Safe spent more than $18,400 on 11 advertisements on Facebook and Instagram, most of them garnering tens of thousands of impressions.
Keep North Vancouver Safe has just a few dozen followers on those platforms, and the website — which contains multiple references to "the safety of our community" — contains no details about who runs it.
The website encourages users to contact elected officials using an embedded email feature. Listed recipients include the District of North Vancouver mayor and councillors, two MLAs and Premier David Eby.
District of North Vancouver Coun. Catherine Pope said in an August interview that she was receiving between 10 and 20 emails a day. She said that is the most correspondence she has received on any given issue since she was elected in 2022.
Pope said she was suspicious of those emails. She could not confirm the writers were residents, she said, and didn't like that the site's operators were anonymous.
"There is nothing on that website that identifies who is behind it. That concerns me. It is not transparent," Pope said.
The office of Susie Chant, the NDP MLA for North Vancouver–Seymour, confirmed she was also receiving those emails — and raised questions about their authenticity.
"From the around 30 emails they've received stemming from this website, only three seem to be possibly linked to real people, and of those three, it's unclear if they're even in her riding," B.C. NDP spokeswoman Julia Witte wrote in an email.
Witte did not respond to multiple emails and calls seeking clarification about why the party believed those messages were fake.
Robert Neubauer, a professor at the University of Winnipeg's Department of Rhetoric, Writing and Communications, said the campaign has the hallmarks of "astroturfing," when an interest group tries to imitate an organic, grassroots community campaign.
Neubauer said such strategies are perfectly legal but morally dubious.
"If you're transparent about [lobbying], that's just part of democracy. When you get into the astroturfing hiding who is behind the organization, then it becomes a problem," he said.
'It's not going to sway my decision'
Robinson, the Chemtrade vice-president, said his company noticed the advertisements but did not know who bought them.
"Usually, when there is lobbying or anything, you'd be open about who you are or what you represent," Robinson said.
Indeed, lobbyists at the provincial and federal levels typically have to publicly register who they work for, what they are lobbying for and the officials they have contacted.
But the Office of the Registrar of Lobbyists for B.C. says that rule doesn't apply to "grassroots lobbying efforts" wherein an organization encourages members of the public to contact officials about a given issue. That means it likely wouldn't apply to the emails sent to MLAs through the Keep North Vancouver Safe website.
"Lobbying legislation in some other jurisdictions does apply to grassroots lobbying, but the [provincial Lobbyists Transparency Act] does not," wrote Michelle Mitchell, a spokeswoman for the office.
The IJF and CBC Vancouver were able to identify Crestview's role in creating the website thanks to code on the website that included Crestview's name.
The IJF and CBC also found an older version of the website's email embed feature that listed a Crestview lobbyist as a recipient.
Craik, the Crestview lobbyist, had also directly approached officials at the municipal level.
On April 1, he wrote an email to District of North Vancouver Mayor Mike Little asking to speak with him about Chemtrade's lease on behalf of "a group of concerned stakeholders," according to a copy of those messages the IJF obtained through Freedom of Information legislation.
The IJF and CBC Vancouver have confirmed Craik also contacted Pope and Muri with a similar message.
In his written response, Craik said K2 Pure Solutions had lobbied officials across North America to end the practice of transporting chlorine by rail.
Craik said K2 aims to produce "exceptionally pure" bleach, which he argues can replace chlorine for water purification.
"We hope that by shining a light on what has been happening behind closed doors in their community, residents of the District of North Vancouver can now start asking their elected councillors the right questions and, frankly, whether they have their constituents or Chemtrade's best interests in mind," Craik said.
Robinson, though, said it would not be feasible for Chemtrade to switch wholesale to bleach production, in part because the product could not be transported long distances.
"You can't ship it far enough to really do the ecological approach that they're really suggesting," Robinson said.
Cynamon, K2's co-founder, argued in his statement that K2 Pure Solutions was not a direct competitor to Chemtrade because it does not transport chlorine and is located in a different region. But Chemtrade's latest quarterly reports do list K2 as a "key competitor" in the production of various chemicals, including chlorine.
"It's a competitor, so you can kind of assume what the benefits would be for a competitor if we had to close down our facility," Robinson said.
Robinson said he is not concerned about the lobbying affecting a potential deal with the port authority and the district. Nor were district councillors convinced.
'It's not going to sway my decision," Muri said.
She and Pope said they were frustrated Crestview and K2 Pure Solutions conducted their campaign secretly.
Muri compared it to the 2022 local election in Squamish, B.C., where an anonymous Facebook campaign spent more than $78,000 on advertisements targeting specific candidates, according to reporting from The Breach and The Tyee.
Muri's message to companies: "Honesty is the best policy."
"Why wouldn't they just come clean and present who they were and be honest about it?" Muri said.
Corrections
- An earlier version of this story identified David Cynamon as a co-founder of Crestview Strategies. In fact, he is a co-founder of K2 Pure Solutions.Sep 11, 2024 10:47 AM PT
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
With CBC files from Jon Hernandez and IJF files from Carly Penrose and Tori Marlan