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Oil and gas industry lobbying in recent years intensified when public servants and politicians were considering pipelines to pump fossil fuels from Alberta to B.C.’s coast, according to a new report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Those projects included the since-scrapped Northern Gateway pipeline and the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline, a piece of infrastructure that Canada ultimately purchased from Kinder Morgan, according to the report, titled Big Oil’s Political Reach.

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The report looked at 11,452 lobbying efforts by 46 oil and gas companies and associations from 2011 to 2018 under prime ministers Justin Trudeau and Stephen Harper. Its authors found that “strategic, organized and sustained lobbying” helped to explain “the past and continuing close coupling of federal policy to the needs of the fossil fuel industry.”

Nicolas Graham, a sociology instructor at the University of Victoria and the lead author of the study, said oil and gas lobbyists contacted government officials an average of six times a day during the seven-year study period. Graham characterized the in-person and remote interactions as “pretty continual contacts between a few firms and a few officials.”