CanWest: Elections Canada to investigate anti-Kyoto group

[tuvor]

OTTAWA -- Canada's chief electoral officer has been asked to investigate a series of radio ads, funded by an Alberta-based global warming skeptics group, which targeted key markets in vote-rich Ontario during the 2006 federal election.

The ads, which questioned the previous Liberal government's climate change spending and initiatives, aired in five major Ontario markets and were financed through an elaborate system which allowed $200,000 to flow from a 53-year-old charity into a trust account at the University of Calgary. The account was then used by an anti-Kyoto Protocol group called the Friends of Science.

The group was formed a few years ago in Alberta by academics and former oil industry insiders, among others, to challenge Canada's participation in the international Kyoto Protocol, a climate change agreement, and to cast doubt on peer-reviewed research that suggests human activity is causing dangerous changes to the climate and irreversible damage to the earth's ecosystems.

Before it ran the ads, the Friends of Science pledged in a newsletter "to have a major impact on the next election." Immediately after the 2006 vote brought Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative party to power, the organization boasted in another newsletter that its campaign was working, generating over 300,000 hits to their website in the days before Canadians went to the polls.

But facing embarrassing questions raised by the online SourceWatch.org encyclopedia, the university conducted an internal audit over the past year....

http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html?id=b2307acc-cc2a-42dc-b562-3ed737847a4d&k=81087