Friends of Science Caught in the Gauntlet
The Friends of Science - the nearly bankrupted Canadian climate change denial organization - comes under fire in the University of Calgary student newspaper, the Gauntlet, which asks a few pointed questions about why the university has not done more to sever the frequent (and financial) associations between Friends and the school.
Most particularly, Jon Roe at the Gauntlet suggests that Professor Barry Cooper, a political scientist who has promoted the connection and helped hide the oily source of the Friends' declining revenue, should be held accountable for having damaged the university's reputation by his actions.
As noted in the Gauntlet article, the DeSmogBlog has also queried Elections Canada about the legality of the Friends' undeclared third-party advertising campaign in the last federal election. The answer may not come quickly, but we're all sitting by the mailbox looking forward to the response.
Interesting...
Kudos to the Gauntlet. Keep up the good work.
May or may not be violation of the Elections Act, but if it's the Calgary Foundation, isn't this a clear violation of the Income Tax Act that precludes charitable monies being used to support or oppose (directly or indirectly) candidates or parties?
The surprising part is that it took so long, for this scrutiny and common sense.
Former Friends of Science spokesperson critical of CBC:
Tim Ball, who FOS (1) listed as "Canada's First Climatology PhD"(despite the fact that the text submitted for Ball's PhD dissertation names and quotes Canadians with previous climatology PhD), bragged to the Fifth Estate interviewers that "I am one of the few people qualified to speak about climate change" (video 2).
He now (Nov 5 news article) says:
"So, how did I (Tim Ball) end up ‘starring’ in the Fifth Estate’s slick ‘docu-ganda’ despite having totally refused to participate?" (3)
1.
http://web.archive.org/web/20051028023311/http://www.friendsofscience.org/
2.
http://video.aol.com/video-detail/the-denial-machine-pt-4/2396016454
in full at http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/denialmachine/
3.
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/510
Tim Ball has shown himself to be a pathological liar. I lost count of the number of lies he has in that cfp article. The only good thing is that the more desperate the deniers become the more obvious their lies are to those with even a modicum of scientific knowledge.
Ian Forrester