Warning Industry Propaganda Below
NOTE: the article on GMO’s is followed by additional profiles of Gwyn Morgan.
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The Globe and Mail
Agriculture
Beware the harmful consequences of following junk science
‘My global “junk science” award goes to the myriad environmental groups and associated acolytes united in opposition to genetically modified foods’
by Gwyn Morgan
The man who removes the moss from our lawn after the West Coast’s winter rainy season was depressed and bewildered. After spending decades building his clientele and practising his trade in the most careful and responsible manner, he is being legislated out of business. The Canadian Cancer Society is calling for a B.C.-wide ban on the sale of weed killers and insecticides for “non-agricultural” use. Several B.C. municipalities already prohibit the use of such products, even to the point where the bits of vinegar our lawn guy puts on our patches of paving-stone moss are considered a public danger.
Here in Victoria, many of the city’s signature cherry trees will go through a slow and ugly death from blight because of the banning of a product that could safely protect them. It also means ferns, dogwood and other native species will be defenceless as they are overrun by introduced foreign invaders. The cancer society bases its campaign on the claim that weed killers such as Roundup and insecticides such as Raid may be linked to certain types of cancer. Yet the medical evidence is scant. One study found that men working in pesticide manufacturing plants had a slightly elevated frequency of prostate cancer, but several other studies found no relationship between pesticides and cancer. Some studies have suggested that farmers who use large amounts of weed killer may have an increased risk of lymphoma, but a large U.S. study found the difference to be a statistically insignificant.
Those who defend such knee-jerk public policy actions often cite the “precautionary principle.” But if believing in junk science means people are to be driven out of business and public landscapes are to be left unprotected from blights and invasive species, and if home gardeners are forbidden from using the latest and best products, what is “precautionary” about that?
Unfortunately, junk science is a widespread disease. Environmental activists are generally against so-called chemical fertilizers. But what makes manure and compost more virtuous than nitrogen and potassium fertilizers?
Let’s start with nitrogen. The scientific fact is that the soil doesn’t know the difference between nitrogen sources, as long as it gets enough. Potassium fertilizers are made from a naturally occurring mineral called potash and, here again, the soil doesn’t care where it comes from. While organic products are generally very safe, there is no doubt that the raw animal waste sometimes used as fertilizer carries a higher consumer and groundwater pathogen risk. On the other hand, the composting often used in organic gardening has a positive impact on soil stability and water retention.
If soil science doesn’t make organic food a superior choice, what about the claims of nutritional superiority? A recent large-scale U.S. study found no
discernible difference. Organic foods cost more because they are more labour-intensive, and yields per arable hectare are lower than conventional
farming.
The plain fact is that organic food consumption is a feel-good indulgence for those willing and able to pay a premium, but organic farming methods could never begin to feed every Canadian, let alone the world’s population.
My global “junk science” award goes to the myriad environmental groups and associated acolytes united in opposition to genetically modified
foods (GM foods), or as they have labelled them, “frankenfoods.” Policy makers in Europe have reacted by banning domestic production or
importation of GM foods. This despite the fact that there are no credible studies showing negative impacts from consuming GM foods, and there isn’t even a plausible scientific theory as to why there would be.
Most of the grains, fruits and vegetables that make up modern diets are vastly different than their ancient ancestors. Humans have continuously cross-bred food plants in search of higher yields, improved taste, better nutrition and disease resistance. An important Canadian example is canola; traditional “genetic modification” methods transformed the bitter rapeseed into a healthy and tasty oilseed.
Astounding progress in identifying the genetic building blocks of organisms has accelerated the long and arduous genetic modification process, offering huge potential leaps forward in the increasingly urgent search for higher yielding and more nutritious crops to feed a hungry world. Erosion caused by denuding natural vegetation, groundwater depletion and biological runoff make agricultural production the most damaging human endeavour to our planet’s soil, water and aquatic life. GM foods research shows promise of making a big difference.
Seed crops that lower fertilizer requirements and need less water are already a reality. Agra-giant Monsanto has developed an herbicide-resistant seed grain that eliminates the need for fallow tillage to control weeds, thereby reducing water needs, air emissions and soil erosion. This is only one of the GM foods advances made by this innovative and research-intensive company, yet the frankenfood crowd’s propaganda has portrayed Monsanto as an environment-destroying corporate pariah.
And so we come full circle in the great farm and garden junk science game, from British Columbia’s well-meaning but scientifically illiterate municipal councillors, to the Canadian Cancer Society’s campaign against weed and bug killers, to the organic industry’s self-serving claim of environmental and nutritional superiority, to the GM foods-opposing frankenfood crowd. It’s hard to find evidence that supports any of these claims, but it isn’t hard to see the harmful consequences these misguided policies can, and do, have.
Gwyn Morgan is the retired founding CEO of EnCana Corp.
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39th PARLIAMENT, 1st SESSION
EDITED HANSARD • NUMBER 152
CONTENTS
Friday, May 11, 2007
In April 2006, the Prime Minister tried to appoint Gwyn Morgan, a Conservative Party fundraiser, to the position of chairman of the new public appointments commission. This appointment was blocked by a parliamentary committee dominated by opposition members.
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The Fraser Institute
Who We Are
Board of Directors
http://www.fraserinstitute.org/aboutus/whoweare/boardofdirectors.htm
Chairman Hassan Khosrowshahi
Vice Chairmen Edward S. Belzberg
Mark W. Mitchell, Gwyn Morgan,
Board Members
Salem Ben Nasser Al Ismaily, Louis-Philippe Amiot, Gordon E. Arnell, Charles B. Barlow, Everett E. Berg, T. Patrick Boyle, Peter Brown,
Joseph C. Canavan, Alex A. Chafuen, Elizabeth Chaplin, Derwood S. Chase, Jr., James W. Davidson, John Dielwart, Stuart M. Elman,
Greg C. Fleck, Shaun Francis, Ned Goodman, Arthur N. Grunder, John A. Hagg, Paul Hill, Stephen A. Hynes, David H. Laidley, Robert H. Lee,
Brandt Louie, David R. Mackenzie, Hubert R. Marleau, James L. McGovern, Mark R. Mullins, Eleanor Nicholls, Roger Phillips, Herbert C. Pinder, Jr., R. Jack Pirie, Conrad S. Riley, Gavin Semple, Rod Senft, Anthony W. Sessions, William W. Siebens, Anna Stylianides, Arni C. Thorsteinson, Michael A. Walker, Catherine Windels,
Fraser Forum – April 2005 – Critical Thinking on Risk and the Environment
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Maclean’s January 13, 2003
Author BRIAN BERGMAN
Morgan, Gwyn (Profile)
BY HIS OWN ACCOUNT, the most powerful man in Canada’s OIL patch is, at heart, a simple country boy. Gwyn Morgan, president and chief
executive officer of EnCana Corp., the world’s largest independent oil and gas producer, traces his core values and philosophy of life and business to his modest upbringing on a hardscrabble grain and livestock farm near Carstairs, Alta. The youngest of four children, Morgan, now 57, remembers, at age 13, helping his Welsh-born father dig a ditch from the well to the house that finally brought the family indoor plumbing. Like most farm kids, his day began with two hours of chores – milking the cows, feeding the pigs, collecting eggs – and ended much the same way. “Around our house, there wasn’t any cajoling,” he says. “It was simply expected that you do your part – and do it well.” Besides instilling a strong work ethic, Morgan says, his parents passed on lessons that have guided him ever since. Among them: “Keep your word. Stay honest. Do your best. If the world deals you a tough blow, buck up and move on.”
Morgan has certainly moved on. As recently as 1998, Peter C. Newman’s Titans, a 650-page tome on “the new Canadian establishment,” made only passing mention of him as a “promising comer to watch.” Well, the promise has been fulfilled, the “comer” has arrived. By engineering the April 2002 merger of two oil and gas behemoths, Alberta Energy Co. Ltd. (which Morgan helped establish in the 1970s and had headed since 1994) and PanCanadian Energy Corp., the farmer’s son vaulted from a position of relative obscurity to someone who readily commands attention on the national stage. Morgan shows every sign of making the most of it. In a recent flurry of high-profile speeches, newspaper op-ed pieces and letters to the Prime Minister, Morgan has sounded off on everything from political and corporate corruption to what he describes as the “fatally flawed” Kyoto Protocol. And he has done it his way, with a high moral tone more often heard in chapel than in the corridors of commerce.
Take his performance at a black-tie dinner in Toronto in November, where Morgan received the 2002 Ivey Business Leader Award, an honour bestowed annually by alumni of the University of Western Ontario’s Richard Ivey School of Business. In his acceptance speech, Morgan lamented that some no longer draw a link between a leader’s personal and public conduct. “For example,” he said, “I recently had an animated dinner argument with a New York Times columnist who argued that Bill Clinton’s personal ethical transgressions, which include adultery and lying, were of lesser importance compared with his accomplishments as president. Needless to say, we agreed to disagree, profoundly.”
Morgan went on to criticize both business and political leaders for basing too many of their decisions on shortsighted yardsticks – for the former, overnight stock quotes; for the latter, public opinion polls. “The Old Testament,” he intoned, “gave the world a universal truth: ‘Where there is no vision, the people perish.’ I believe it is time for Canada’s corporate and political leadership to go back to the Bible, figuratively at least, until they get this message straight.”
The impression left is of a holy roller out to smite the unrighteous. But, as is often the case with Morgan, the stereotype doesn’t quite fit. During a
wide-ranging interview at his executive offices in downtown Calgary, Morgan is asked about his religious views. “I live with the idea there is a greater force at work in the universe, and celebrate that,” he says. “But I haven’t found in any of the conventional religions a fully satisfactory
explanation. I’m kind of like a pre-Muslim, pre-Christian, pre-Jewish person. Remember when they all said there was a God and all worshipped the same one?”
AS MANY have remarked, Gwyn Morgan doesn’t remotely resemble Central Casting’s image of an oil baron. Slim and bespectacled, he speaks so softly that a listener sometimes has to lean in to pick up what he’s saying. The ardent free-enterpriser could easily be mistaken for a government bureaucrat – perish the thought.
Morgan surprises in other ways. He is an advocate of holistic medicine, not a common oil-patch preoccupation. EnCana is the primary corporate sponsor of the Integrative Health Institute, a Calgary-based non-profit organization that provides resource information and counselling on blending modern medicine with such traditional practices as acupuncture, meditation and herbal remedies. But this is no granola-and-incense exercise. Morgan is out to create a model for how people can take more responsibility for their own well-being and help contain spiralling health-care costs. “What we have in this country is an illness treatment system, not a health-care system,” he says. “We need a more preventative approach and there’s a lot of knowledge accumulated over thousands of years that can help in this regard.”
Morgan’s holistic bent is tied to another private passion. He is, as friends and associates freely assert, a “fitness freak.” Morgan walks (or, more accurately, strides) to work from the downtown luxury condo he shares with wife Pat Trottier, a fellow Carstairs native and long-time oil and gas
consultant (the couple have one daughter, Jennifer, 24, from Trottier’s first marriage). He dedicates a minimum of one hour a day to a vigorous
cross-training regime which includes running, skipping rope and an upper-body workout. He also estimates that he’s hiked, cycled, canoed and skied literally thousands of kilometres through remote stretches of British Columbia, Alberta and the Far North.
Morgan is often described as “intense” and “driven.” He begs to differ. “Given my lifestyle, I think I’m one of the more balanced people in the business,” he says with just the hint of a smile. “What I would say is that I’m focused. Whatever the task is at hand, I zero in on it and give it my undivided attention.”
No argument there from those who know him. Dick Haskayne, chairman of both TransCanada PipeLines Ltd. and Fording Inc., first met Morgan in the 1970s. A longtime board member with Alberta Energy Co., Haskayne was instrumental in the appointment of Morgan as CEO in 1994. “He’s a very intelligent and impressive fellow,” says Haskayne. “He can cut through the issues to get to the end point quicker than most people.” Martin Molyneaux, managing director of institutional research for the Calgary-based investment dealer FirstEnergy Capital Corp., puts it more bluntly. “Gwyn has a very low tolerance for bullshitting,” he says. “He doesn’t do it to others and he doesn’t expect people to do it to him.”
Under Morgan’s leadership, AEC, which started out in 1973 as a provincially owned Crown corporation, transformed into what Molyneaux describes as “a lean, mean, corporate machine.” Morgan shed many of the company’s assets – including interests in timber and mining – to concentrate on the oil and gas sector. He engineered a series of hostile takeovers (Morgan prefers the term “unsolicited friendly offers”) and built AEC into Canada’s
second-largest petroleum producer behind Talisman Energy Inc.
Morgan’s nose for the main chance surfaced again in October 2001 when he heard about the abrupt departure of David Tuer as chief executive of PanCanadian, the recently spun-off energy unit of Canadian Pacific Ltd. Morgan initiated backroom negotiations with David O’Brien, the former chairman, president and CEO of Canadian Pacific who had replaced Tuer on an interim basis at PanCanadian. The result was a $21-billion friendly merger that created EnCana, an energy powerhouse with massive holdings both in Canada and around the world, including the American Rocky Mountain states, Ecuador and the North Sea.
While the deal was technically a takeover of AEC by PanCanadian, it was clear from the outset that EnCana would be very much Morgan’s baby. Molyneaux notes EnCana has almost entirely absorbed the aggressive, decentralized corporate structure championed by Morgan at AEC. “Gwyn gives his people a lot of latitude to execute a business plan,” says Molyneaux. “But if you say you are going to do something, you better do it. He’s a stickler for making people keep their promises.”
MORGAN doesn’t court controversy, but the mixture of his outspoken convictions and the scope of his business empire ensures he attracts more than his share. In 1998, AEC became one of the targets in a spate of bombings and vandalism at oil-field sites in northwestern Alberta. Wiebo Ludwig, a farmer and ex-preacher, claimed sour gas wells, some of them owned by AEC, were poisoning his land and his family. Ludwig, who was later sentenced to 28 months in jail for five offences, including bombing one gas well and vandalizing another, once exclaimed of Morgan: “Sometimes I think we should take [him] hostage, tie him up…and then slit his throat.”
At Ludwig’s trial, it was revealed that, in building their case against Ludwig, the RCMP had staged a phony bombing of an abandoned gas-well shack owned by AEC, a tactic reminiscent of the force’s dirty tricks campaign against Quebec separatists in the 1970s. Morgan insisted then, as he does now, that he acted properly in co-operating with the police. He also laments that, in some quarters, Ludwig continues to be regarded as a folk hero. “What sort of principles do people have,” he asks, “to idealize someone who resorts to a form of terrorism?”
Morgan became immersed in a different kind of dispute in 1999 when he resigned as chairman of the Alberta chapter of the Canadian Olympic Foundation, where he’d helped raise $300,000 over the previous four years. He did so to protest corruption within the International Olympic Committee. Morgan then shifted AEC’s support to an athletes’ organization co-founded by Olympic gold-medallist swimmer and Calgary native Mark Tewksbury. “We approached everyone we could think of to help us push the reform process,” says Tewksbury, who now lives in Montreal where he is helping to organize the 2006 Gay Games. “Gwyn was the only one who stepped up and really took a personal stand.”
More recently, EnCana has come under fire from several lobby groups, including Greenpeace and the David Suzuki Foundation, because of a $1.7-billion pipeline EnCana and its partners are building through an ecologically sensitive slice of the rain forest in Ecuador. Morgan maintains the criticisms are unfair and unwarranted and says the company is determined to “leave the environment in Ecuador in better shape than we found it.” He blames the controversy, in part, on radical activists who oppose all oil and gas development. “There are environmental groups we can work with,” he says, “and those we can’t.”
Morgan’s pitched battle, along with other industry executives, against the Kyoto accord has also put him at odds with many environmentalists. He has argued that Ottawa’s rush to ratify the international accord, which sets strict targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2012, is regionally divisive, potentially devastating to the Canadian economy – and will do nothing to improve the environment. Like many others, including Alberta Premier Ralph Klein, Morgan advocates a “made-in-Canada” approach to reducing emissions in a manner that won’t destabilize the economy. Morgan also believes there needs to be much more debate about whether greenhouse gas emissions are causing global warming, or if it is part of a natural cycle of the earth’s warming and cooling. “I’ve listened to scientists on both sides of the issue,” he says, “and both make terribly convincing cases.”
Such views are a red flag to people like Robert Hornung, policy director of the widely respected, Alberta-based Pembina Institute. “Morgan downplays the consensus of scientific opinion on this issue,” says Hornung, “and significantly overstates the economic doom and gloom.” All the same, Hornung credits what he calls “the big propaganda campaign” by the Alberta government and corporate leaders like Morgan for Ottawa’s announcement last month that it will cap the amount industry must pay to meet the Kyoto targets. “They’ve succeeded in having a lot of the burden shifted off their shoulders,” says Hornung. “It will be individual Canadians who pay the price.”
Morgan does, in fact, sound much more sanguine about the accord these days. “Now that it’s been ratified, maybe we can be less political and more
rational about this thing,” he says. “Canadians want us all to work together.” On this, and many other fronts, the former farm boy promises to
be a player – a man who speaks softly while wielding a very big stick.
http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=M1ARTM0012432