[getsmart-l] Who funds the Fraser Institute?

[23 Skidoo]

Here is a question which journalists would ask if they had any ability to be reflective on the world around them and actually notice how lobbying by right wing 'think' tanks advance their reactionary agenda. Its alot of money directing their traffic and nobody seems to be paying attention
 
Film at 11:00
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Who funds the Fraser Institute? 
http://bctf.ca/publications/NewsmagArticle.aspx?id=7914>http://bctf.ca/ publications/NewsmagArticle.aspx?id=7914 
by Donald Gutstein 
Aspiring reporters are taught to "follow the money" when doing business or government stories. Whos financing the project? Who will benefit from the rezoning or the tax break? Who will lose out? 
Last year, the Fraser Institute celebrated its 30th anniversary. A gala was held in Calgary for 1,200 well-fed libertarians, conservatives, and reactionaries. Only two numbers were mentioned in the news coverage: 30 and 1,200. Missing was the more important number: 100 million, the dollars, more or less, that have been funnelled through the institute over the years. 
Early on, Executive Director Michael Walker had to scramble to meet his payroll of $100,000. Last year, he brought in $6.6 million, the largest amount in its history, vaulting it past some of its sister propaganda outfits in the U.S. When averaged, the grand total is about $100 million. 
Forgetting what their journalism profs told them, reporters never asked whos pouring that much money into the think tank, and why? 
True, it isnt easy to answer this question unless Walker divulges the information, and for once, hes not talking. Canadian law for tax-exempt societies does not require contributors to be made public. The institutes annual report provides a breakdown by category of donor: 52% from foundations, 38% from organizations, and the remainder from individuals. 
Tax-exempt foundations must list recipients of their grants, so it is possible to identify most of the foundation money. Four large Canadian foundations provide the lions share of nearly $3.5 million from that source. 
Until recently, the leader was the Donner Canadian Foundation, a key organization in the project to change the ideological fabric of Canadian society. It is known as paymaster to the right, and its safe to say that the reactionary right would have made little headway in Canada in the past decade without Donners backing. Stephen Harper would be a nobody, for instance. 
Donner, with assets of $200 million, gives out two million a year to right-wing causes. In the mid-1990s, it established three new libertarian think tanks: the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, in Halifax, the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, in Winnipeg, and the Montreal Economic Institute. 
In 2002, the latest year for which figures are available, Donner contributed nearly half a million dollars to the Fraser Institute, including $200,000 for Donner Awards in the Delivery of Social Services. This is a program to undermine government by ostensibly demonstrating that the voluntary sector does better than the public sector in delivering social services. (So who needs government?) 
In their fawning coverage of the institutes anniversary party, reporters never asked who has poured $100 million into the right-wing think-tank, and why. 
Donner also gave $100,000 to start CanStats, a Fraser Institute division that purports to monitor how the media report science and statistics. Most of the work is done by ideologues who are neither scientists nor statisticians. Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman call this activity "flak." By criticizing and harassing mainstream media, flak organizations can pull media reporting to the right. 
By the late 1990s, right-wing Canadian foundations were exhibiting the same co-ordinated funding behaviour that made the American foundations so formidable. This dangerous development occurred after Michael Walker joined the board of Calgary-based Max Bell Foundation in 1996. (He left in 2003.) Along with Donner, Bell began providing large sums for school-choice projects, which are designed to destabilize public education, including $500,000 to the Fraser Institute and similar amounts for charter schools in Alberta. Max Bell also provides money for an intern to marshal the evidence in favour of for-profit healthcare. 
Walker reined in two more foundations to support the school-choice work, the Lotte and John Hecht Memorial Foundation, whose money came from selling arms, and the W. Garfield Weston Foundation, whose money comes from a less colourful source: selling biscuits. Galen Weston, Canadas second wealthiest person, and his family are becoming the most important funding source. They have committed more than $10 million on the institutes school vouchers program. 
Corporate contributions are buried in the institutes accounts. Its been 20 years since Walker released a list of corporate members. But a look at the board of trustees reveals some interesting patterns. 
Theres a representative from Pfizer, the worlds largest multinational drug company. Just coincidentally, since Walker claims no trustee can tell the staff what to do, the Fraser has a pharmaceutical-policy division, which attacks internet pharmacies that provide cheaper drugs for Americans, disparages critics of drug-company policies regarding distribution of HIV/AIDs drugs in Africa, attacks generic drugs, and opposes the ban on direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs, all of benefit to Pfizer. 
Theres big and small oil and gas money from Calgary (Gwyn Morgan of EnCana, R. J. Pirie of Sabre Energy). Just coincidentally the Fraser has supported climate-change skeptics for nearly a decade. 
There are investors from Vancouver (Peter Brown, of Cannacord Capital) and Toronto (James McGovern, of Arrow Hedge Partners, who manages $300 million in hedge funds for high-net-worth individuals). Just coincidentally, cutting corporate and income taxes has been a Fraser mainstay. 
If the media dont tell the story, Canadians wont know about the Frasers reactionary agenda. 
Its not obvious why the CBCs coverage of the gala was so uncritical and boosterish. Perhaps the public broadcaster is cowed by decades of anti-CBC flak generated by the institute. 
CanWest Globals slavish coverage is more understandable. David Asper is no longer a trustee. He resigned when he became publisher of The National Post. But The Calgary Herald was a sponsor of the event, and former Fraser Institute intern Danielle Smith, a Herald editorial writer and now host of Aspers Global Sunday, emceed the evening. 
The Ottawa Citizen editorialized that the Fraser Institute is a dissenting hero standing up to the socialist establishment. Another interpretation is that the Fraser is a small cog in a global wheel of reaction designed to roll back the democratic gains of the 20th century. Hundreds of millions of corporate and foundation dollars make the wheel go round. 
Donald Gutstein is a senior lecturer in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. He was co-director of Project Censored Canada and NewsWatch Canada and is currently working on a book about corporate propaganda. 
Source: <http://www.straightgoods.com/>
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