Alberta's Election -- A Win For People And Huge Loss For The Kochs

The Koch Brothers

Besides the obvious surprise of a complete flip in control in Alberta from the Conservative Progressives to the NDP, there's also an Easter egg of a gift involved. That election was a complete repudiation of Charles and David Koch's meddling ways in Canadian politics.

Both brothers might claim their political expenditures are purely altruistic and an expression of their patriotic belief in America's free enterprise system, but the truth is something else. They don't invest solely in American politics -- they've been pouring money into Canada, and specifically Alberta, for years. One of their big investments is in the Fraser Institute, a climate-denying "think tank".

Bruce Livesey, writing for the National Observer, has written an excellent piece on how deeply entrenched the Kochs and their corporate interests are in Alberta's political landscape:

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Greenpeace’s most recent research shows that since 1997, the Kochs have spent a total of US$79-million to groups that deny climate change science.

Some of that cash has come north to Canada – specifically to the Fraser Institute. As first revealed by the Vancouver Observer, tax records show that since 2007, the Fraser Institute, one of Canada’s oldest conservative think tanks, has pocketed a total of US$765,000 from one of Charles Kochs’ foundations.  READ MORE