The Alberta government’s Canadian Energy Centre — its long-promised, much-hyped “rapid-response war room," a provincial corporation with a $30-million annual budget — finally launched on Dec. 11. It embarked on its noble mission with all appropriate pomp and ceremony, by which I mean there was a website and a sort of self-promotional video. The video serves as an impressive statement of the war room's purpose, particularly given the tire fire of unforced errors and obvious untruths the war room has set ablaze in the days since. Let's take a look at the inaccuracies — and one notable accuracy — of the war room's YouTube debut. The video's voice-over is delivered in that boastful, hyper-masculine growl native to truck ads, set against a stomping country-rock backing track that comes across like Hank Williams Jr. covering Queen. (Are you ready for some propaganda?)

“Canadian oil and gas makes our world better,” the narrator begins. And then, as if anticipating your raised finger of possible dissent, he quickly adds, “It just does.” From there, the video unfurls as a stock-image montage of good things and happy people as the voice-over recites a list of virtues attributable to Canada’s oil and gas sector. These include (but are by no means limited to) “more healthy babies, more healthy mothers, more wisdom, more opportunities and more joy all over the planet.” Because global joy is very difficult to measure empirically, I can't say for certain whether this claim is wholly inaccurate or just somewhat overstated. It might be even more difficult to record the overall volume of global wisdom, let alone track its changing level over time or trace it to a particular fuel source. In any case, these claims are spectacular to behold. Perhaps most remarkable, in the midst of a production that’s about as nuanced as a Super Bowl halftime show, is that one climate detail is absolutely right — a diligent effort to correct an untruth spread by Premier Jason Kenney himself. As I noted recently, Kenney has a penchant for hyperbole, and one of his preferred exaggerations is to call Alberta’s energy business “the most environmentally responsible oil and gas industry on Earth.” This is impossible to square with the fact that producing oil from the oilsands creates more greenhouse gas emissions per barrel than most other sources. So I was delighted to hear the voice-over in the war room’s launch video intone that Alberta’s oil and gas “are produced to among the highest environmental, social and governance standards in the world.” The emphasis is mine. It’s a single word, but it stands out so starkly against the claims that all the world's babies and other opportunity seekers owe their good luck to Prairie fossil fuels that I can't help but wonder if there's a foreign-funded radical mole hidden in the war room's editing suite. If so, Kenney might do well to promote the mole, because the rest of the Canadian Energy Centre's output has mostly struggled to exhibit the professional communications savvy of a high school yearbook committee. Whatever else it intends to do, the war room has made a spectacle of itself in its first couple of weeks of operation. An early warning of what was to come arrived in an introductory post at the war room’s website by its founding director, Tom Olsen. The post was soon appended with a correction because Olsen had misidentified his own organization as a “Crown corporation” whereas, in fact, it is a “provincial government corporation.” (This is no minor distinction; the war room was deliberately established as such so that it would be immune to Freedom of Information requests.) Olsen also Freudian-slipped his way into the headlines soon after the launch, when he told Global News, “We are not about attacking, we are about disproving true facts.”