"For those of you who think it’s outrageous to compare the premier of Alberta with the autocratic leaders of Russia and Hungary, have a look at their respective approaches to non-governmental organizations."

Premier Jason Kenney during the Throne Speech at the Alberta Legislature Building in Edmonton, Alberta, on Wednesday, May 22, 2019. (Codie McLachlan/Star Edmonton)

Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban, meet your latest secret admirer. He’s a provincial politician in a part of Canada famous for the Rocky Mountains, a very large indoor mall and an open-pit oil sands mine about the size of Siberia.

Your secret admirer’s name is Jason Kenney, and he was recently elected the premier of Alberta. Like both of you, he’s a conservative and a defender of traditional values against the onslaught of liberalism, especially of the global variety.

Like both of you guys, Kenney is a democrat, at least on paper. But he doesn’t really like to hear opposing opinions when they don’t coincide with his world view, like those pesky environmentalists who might be worried about stuff like climate change, the impact of uncontrolled development of pipelines and oil sands operations, and soaring greenhouse-gas emissions. And he definitely doesn’t think Albertans should have to worry about those views.

For those of you who think it’s outrageous to compare the premier of Alberta with the autocratic leaders of Russia and Hungary, have a look at their respective approaches to non-governmental organizations.

Putin has famously railed against foreign influences on NGOs for years. When nationwide protests against his government broke out in Russia in 2011, Putin struck back. A Foreign Agents Law was passed by the Russian Parliament a year later designed to control and silence NGOs that were critical of his regime.

The law requires any NGO receiving foreign funding and carrying out activities to be deemed as “political” and register as a “foreign agent,” tantamount to self-declaring as a traitor or spy against Mother Russia. Scared to death by the crackdown, NGOs have stopped taking foreign money or shut down altogether. Civil society has been strangled.

Among those caught in the crossfires of the Putin law have been Russian human rights and environmental groups. Like Kenney, Putin hates environmentalists.

Just last month, a prominent Russian environmentalist, Alexandra Koroleva, was forced to flee the country and seek asylum in Germany after her organization, Ecodefence, refused to register under the 2012 “foreign agent” law. The group is opposed to construction of a nuclear plant in the Kaliningrad region, where it’s based.

Russian authorities have fined Ecodefence on multiple occasions for failing to submit reports under the “foreign agents” law. Koroleva fled the country, fearful that she could face two years in prison for failing to pay the fines.

Human Rights Watch reports that more than 30 agents have shut down rather accept the label of being a “foreign agent.”

In Hungary, run by the arch-nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban, foreign funders have also been convenient scapegoats for his government’s racist anti-immigrant crackdown, a hit with Hungarian voters. Orban has targeted George Soros, the Hungarian-born American billionaire philanthropist for special attention, using crude anti-Semitic propaganda to accuse Soros-backed NGOs of planning to flood Hungary with millions of mainly Muslim migrants.

The Hungarian Parliament passed a law requiring NGOs that receive foreign funding to pay a 25 per cent tax on any money from abroad used to support immigration. As in Russia, all NGOs receiving foreign funding must register as such or face sanctions.

Which brings me back to Jason Kenney, who announced this past week the establishment of a “public inquiry” (sounds more like a kangaroo court) into what he says is the campaign to stop development of Alberta’s oil sands that he blames on “foreign-funded special interests.”

“For more than a decade, Alberta has been the target of a well-funded, political propaganda campaign to defame our energy industry and to landlock our industry,” Kenney said. Energy Minister Sonya Savage, who used to work for the pipeline lobby, said she had witnessed “the devastation and the destruction of this foreign-funded campaign.”

Of course, environmental groups say this is all hogwash, that they get most of their funding from Canadian sources who will probably be encouraged to up their donations following this latest threat from Edmonton.

And, of course, Kenney isn’t worried a bit about the involvement of the largely foreign-owned oil industry and its apologists, including the infamous Koch brothers, in encouraging their pipeline-under-every-garden, pickup-truck-in-every-driveway policy of ecological ruin for the planet.

And what if Americans concerned about climate change want to contribute to an environmental organization active in Canada? Why shouldn’t they? The same navel-gazing logic would stop Canadians from contributing to human rights and environmental groups outside our borders. After all, why should Canadians worry if China is opening concentrations camps for its Uyghur citizens or Russia and Hungary are attacking democratic freedoms? It’s none of our business. If we want to wreck our corner of the world to suit the Alberta oil industry, why not?

It’s easy to dismiss Kenney’s grandstanding as a $2.5-million piece of PR for his United Conservative Party that will have no practical impact. Federal authorities govern non-profit organizations, and there’s little chance of his inquiry going anywhere.

But this allegation of foreign interference has been a favourite of the Canadian right for years. In the Harper years, they managed to instigate bogus audits against environmental groups, which found nothing. And there’s an election coming this fall.

If Kenney’s puppet in Ottawa, Andrew Scheer, manages to win, perhaps Canadian NGOs should start sharing notes with their colleagues in Russia and Hungary.

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