While he didn’t mention Krause by name — just hearing Kenney mention the concerted U.S.-funded campaign to landlock Alberta oil — was like hitting the release valve on a pressure cooker.

Distroscale

Finally, the lies that have been spread about Alberta’s world-leading, ethical energy industry over the past decade were mentioned for the first time by a Canadian premier on a national stage.

So intense was the pressure, that Krause’s 26-year-old daughter, Zoe, burst into tears when she heard an excerpt of Kenney’s speech Thursday night during Krause’s visit to Toronto, where she was speaking.

“I’m sitting here with my daughter … I had not seen Kenney’s speech until five minutes before you called and I’m sitting here on my daughter’s bed in her apartment and she burst into tears because this is what she grew up with,” explained Krause.

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“She was in Grade 10 when I started this research and all of those years watching her mom get (figuratively) beat up, get nowhere, people made fun of her, all the names I got called, all the legal action I had to pay for. We were shunned. I was shunned.

“At school she couldn’t talk about it because David Suzuki’s granddaughter was in her class,” added Krause, who lives in Vancouver.

Kenney told the ecstatic Calgary crowd he would use every means at his disposal — which likely means legal action — as well as launching “a public inquiry into the foreign source of funds behind the campaign to landlock Alberta energy.”

“And now I have a message to those foreign-funded special interests who have been leading a campaign of economic sabotage against this great province,” he said.

“To the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Tides Foundation, Lead Now, the David Suzuki Foundation and all of the others — your days of pushing around Albertans with impunity just ended.”

“We Albertans are patient and fair minded, but we have had enough of your campaign of defamation and double standards. Today, we begin to stand up for ourselves, for our jobs, for our future. Today we begin to fight back.

“From this point forward, when you lie about how we produce energy, we will tell the truth assertively, and we will use every means at our disposal to hold you to account.

“When multinational companies like HSBC boycott Alberta, we’ll boycott them,” he said.

Krause laughs with delight at Kenney’s speech.

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“(Zoe) saw the clip of Kenney saying he was going to take on the Rockefellers and Tides, and she burst into tears,” said Krause. “She couldn’t believe it. She said, ‘mom, this guy is going to be the premier? The future premier is talking about this?’ She just couldn’t believe it. She cried because it’s just such a relief.”

Krause says for years she was a pariah and yet she courageously soldiered on.

“I used to joke, I would go to an event, say the Vancouver Board of Trade or the B.C. Business Council and I could clear the room faster than a fire alarm,” she said with a chuckle. “That used to be my standard joke, except it was true. But not any more. I’m the keynote speaker at the B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual general meeting.”

Krause is a keynote speaker at countless events all over the country — literally from coast, to coast, to coast.

During those speeches, she warns her audience that she’ll be displaying lots of boring-looking slides that prove millions of dollars in payments from U.S. charitable foundations are being made to Canadian environmental groups annually. Without displaying the documents, her revelations would come off “like a tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory.”

Eight years ago, while researching who was behind a misinformation campaign against farmed Canadian salmon, Krause came across three words that piqued her interest: Tar Sands Campaign.”

She found those words in the tax forms of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (which, ironically, made its billions from oil and gas). She saw the foundation donated $1.4 million in 2007 to Corporate Ethics, to “recruit the groups, develop the strategy, create a co-ordinated campaign and act as a re-granting agency for the North American Tar Sands Campaign,” states CorpEthics.org, the group’s website.

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“From the very beginning, the campaign strategy was to land-lock the tarsands so their crude could not reach the international market where it could fetch a high price per barrel,” boasted Michael Marx, the executive director of Corporate Ethics. After Postmedia and then the CBC covered this story in January, Marx removed that quote from the website. But, Krause has it all saved on her website along with 30,000 documents she has painstakingly uncovered.

Last Saturday, Krause had a lengthy article, entitled: Rachel Notley, the Rockefellers and Alberta’s landlocked oil, run across the Postmedia chain exposing why Notley, who received legal advice that Krause procured (and still hasn’t been able to fully pay for), to sue the Rockefeller Bros. Fund. “Because the Rockefller Brothers fund was helping to get Notley elected.”

We all know how that turned out.

One of Kenney’s 375 promises, contained in his 117-page election platform — is to establish a “war room” from which to fight “the campaign of defamation against the industry that has helped us to create one of the most prosperous and generous societies on Earth. Krause should be his first hire.

The pressure valve has at long last been released in Alberta and that valve is Krause’s research and Kenney’s willingness to use it.

The hope is that all of that built up frustration and pressure will be effectively used to flatten Alberta’s energy industry opponents.