[CaptainCrunch]

Leadnow's activity in this election.


https://business.financialpost.com/o...adian-election

In eight battleground ridings, Leadnow, a Vancouver non-profit with roots in the United States, was busy helping to try to defeat Andrew Scheer and the Conservatives. According to emails sent to anyone who subscribes, Leadnow made 150,000 phone calls, and in Greater Toronto, it ran radio ads against the Conservatives.

Leadnow is one of the lead organizations in a Rockefeller-funded international effort called The Tar Sands Campaign that aims to land-lock oil and natural gas from Western provinces, keeping Canada out of the global oil market. Leadnow has organized protests against all of the pipeline projects that have been scrapped or stalled: Northern Gateway, Keystone XL, Energy East and Trans Mountain as well as Woodfibre LNG and the Coastal Gaslink project in northern B.C.

Online and in the media, Leadnow has portrayed itself as a thoroughly Canadian youth movement, the brainchild of two university students, Adam Shedletzky and Jamie Biggar. But that is not the whole story.


Leadnow was created as part of the Strategic Incubation program of the Citizen Engagement Laboratory (CEL), a charitable foundation in Oakland, Calif. The CEL created and funded a project called the Online Progressive Engagement Network (OPEN).
In its 2015 annual report, OPEN’s executive director, Ben Brandzel, bragged that OPEN ran “a Canadian campaign that moved the needle during the 2015 national election, contributing greatly to the ousting of the Conservative Harper government.” On the basis of that and other evidence, I (and others) made detailed submissions about Leadnow to Elections Canada. After a 17-month investigation during 2017 and 2018, nothing illegal was found.


In 2011, Brandzel came to Canada and helped launch Leadnow. For years, his Facebook profile said, perhaps jokingly, “I can see the Golden Gate from one house and the Washington Monument from the other. And I spend a lot of time interloping in the affairs of foreign nations.” Shortly after Elections Canada opened its investigation, that sentence was removed.


U.S. tax returns show that during its early years, OPEN received US$257,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the same Rockefeller charity that provided the seed funding and continues to fund the co-ordination of The Tar Sands Campaign against Canadian oil.
Ironically, the effect of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s activism is not to reduce overall world oil production but to shift more of that production to the American monopoly that has Canada over a barrel. By scaring investors away from Canada, activism is diverting billions of investment dollars into the U.S. where the oil industry is booming.