Alberta Premier Jason Kenney took to Twitter on Wednesday, accusing the federal Liberal government of approving a $2.5-million grant to a “left wing special interest group.”
However, the funding was granted to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) by the former Conservative government under former Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Kenney made the accusation by retweeting an opinion piece titled “Pipeline protesters shouldn’t be funded by taxpayers,” written by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation on Tuesday.
“The federal government benefits massively from taxes generated by our oil & gas industry and workers,” Kenney’s tweet read. “So why did the Trudeau Liberals give $2.5 million to a left wing special interest group to attack our energy industry?”
According to its website, the SSHRC is a federal agency that provides funding for post-secondary research into humanities and social sciences.
The grant in question was made by the SSHRC for a project aimed at “mapping the power of the carbon-extractive corporate resource sector.”
It was approved in April 2015, six months before Justin Trudeau and the Liberals won a majority government in the October 2015 federal election.
William Carroll with the University of Victoria received the grant of $2,496,543, and received another $730,000 from the university.
LISTEN BELOW: Political Sciences professor Dr. Laurie Adkin joins the Ryan Jespersen show on 630 CHED to discuss Kenney’s deleted tweet
According to Adkin, researchers submit grant applications to their research council and the applications are reviewed by peer-reviewed committees. She said the process is independent of government.
“The idea that somehow the government is directly involved, or the cabinet decided who gets funding is a complete misrepresentation and a misunderstanding of how the process works,” Adkin said. “Governments have their ideological agendas and perspectives and if they were to directly decide which kind research gets funding, they would, of course, choose everything that was in alignment with their own projects and views.”
Kenney’s tweet was deleted after staying online for five hours and garnering hundreds of retweets and likes.
“The grant in question was announced a week after the Trudeau government took office, on Nov. 12, 2015. However, it appears that the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council approved it in April 2015, in a decision that did not require or receive ministerial approval,” Kenney spokesperson Harrison Fleming said in a statement. “For greater precision, the Twitter post should have said the ‘federal government’ rather than ‘Trudeau Liberals.'”
But Fleming said the tweet doesn’t change anything about how “Alberta contributes disproportionately to federal taxes,” and that “most Albertans” find it unacceptable that the federal government “would fund attacks on the Canadian energy industry done in collaboration with anti-pipeline pressure groups like the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.”
Although there is no mention of Trudeau or the Liberals in the op-ed, the photo attached to the article shows a group of anti-pipeline protesters holding a photo of Trudeau’s head with oil dripping from his head onto an inflatable globe.
One of the article’s writers, B.C. director of the CTF, Kris Smis, responded to the online criticism of Kenney’s tweet.
“Federal government is the federal government. Don’t care if the Flying Monkey Party is in power: they need to stop wasting our money,” Sims tweeted. “Harper gov shouldn’t have given them taxpayers’ money & the Trudeau gov shouldn’t continue to do so.”
Michael Wynn runs Full Blast Creative, a digital and social media marketing agency in Calgary.
He believes Kenney’s tweet is another example of why it’s important to dig deeper on social media.