For the past year and a half an industry group called the Pathways Alliance has been running national ads claiming oil sands producers are climate leaders “on the road to net zero.” 

But federal records newly reviewed by DeSmog reveal that the group’s co-founder has personally donated to the Conservative Party of Canada, whose leader Pierre Poilievre is campaigning to abolish the country’s most prominent climate policy, a nationwide tax on carbon emissions, saying it brings “misery and suffering on the Canadian people.”

Alex Pourbaix, executive chairman of the Calgary-based oil sands company Cenovus, made a $1,600 donation to the Conservative Party the day after attending a private fundraiser last year entitled “An evening with Pierre Poilievre,” contributions data on the Elections Canada site show. The maximum allowable donation was $1,700. 

Pourbaix helped create the Pathways Alliance, a marketing and lobbying organization that is representing the six largest Canadian oil sands producers in multi-year talks with the current Liberal government of Justin Trudeau about cutting the sector’s climate impacts via large taxpayer-funded investments in carbon capture and storage technology. 

“It’s certainly interesting — or telling — that he made a political donation to the leader of the official opposition,” Emilia Belliveau, energy transition program manager for the non-profit organization Environmental Defence, told DeSmog. She recently wrote a post detailing Pourbaix’s long history of climate obstruction.  

Neither the Pathways Alliance nor Poilievre’s office responded to questions about the donation. 

The fundraising event, which was originally reported on by The Breach, took place at a private residence in the mountain resort town Banff, Alberta, on April 11, 2023. It was promoted by the Conservative Party as a “Bring it Home fundraiser with Pierre Poilievre.” 

Unlike the grassroots members of his party, who in 2021 voted against a resolution acknowledging “climate change is real,” Poilievre acknowledges the existence of human-caused global temperature rise. But he opposes national laws designed to address it. 

Under his leadership, the Conservative Party has claimed that a proposed federal cap on oil and gas emissions would “send dollars to dictators.” He is currently touring Canada promising to “axe” the country’s carbon tax and recently led a failed attempt to topple the minority Liberal government over the policy. In place of climate legislation, he proposes oil and gas industry expansion. “We’re going to clear the way for pipelines,” Poilievre has promised. “I am going to support pipelines south, north, east, west. We will build Canadian pipelines.”  

Around two dozen guests at his 2023 fundraiser in Banff hold executive-level positions with Canadian oil and gas companies or work adjacent to the industry as Calgary-based investors and lawyers specializing in fossil fuels, according to an attendance list analyzed by DeSmog. 

They included Mark Little, the former CEO of Suncor and Tim McKay, the outgoing CEO of CNRL. Both oil sands companies are members of the Pathways Alliance. Fundraising records show that Little and McKay each donated $1,600 to the Conservative Party in the lead-up to the event. 

Those donations came as the Pathways Alliance blitzed the country in advertisements claiming that the oil sands sector is aligned with the Trudeau government’s goal of eliminating or neutralizing all Canadian greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. “Our net-zero plan is in motion,” read one ad on the side of a bus in Vancouver.

The Pathways Alliance reported that it generated 1.5 billion “total advertising impressions” in 2023 alone. However, that campaign is now being investigated by the Competition Bureau over a complaint from Greenpeace alleging that Pathways made false claims downplaying the environmental impact of its members, which are among Canada’s biggest polluters. 

A new peer-reviewed study from researchers at universities in Canada and the U.S. builds on that complaint, concluding that Pathways Alliance advertising throughout 2023 was filled with “greenwashing.” That includes vastly underreporting the true climate impact of oil sands operations, omitting that its carbon capture and storage plan is intended to boost oil sands production and failing to state that the majority of funding would come from Canadian taxpayers, not oil sands companies. 

“In the public-facing content we looked at, their numbers were either questionable or misleading or even just missing when they were talking about their emissions or the cost of the plan,” Chris Russill, a Carleton University journalism professor and academic director of the climate communication centre Re:Climate, told DeSmog about the new peer-reviewed research. “We don’t find their net-zero plan credible.”

InfluenceMap’s updated Carbon Majors report, also released today, reveals that four Pathways Alliance members — Cenovus Energy, Suncor, Canadian Natural Resources, and ConocoPhillips — are among just 117 companies responsible for 88% of global C02 emissions since the Paris Agreement was signed.

Pourbaix insists that decarbonization is a top priority for the oil sands. “Next to safety, there is nothing more important to Cenovus and our industry than reaching a durable solution between government and industry to achieve our emission aspirations,” he told a conference call with analysts several months before the Conservative fundraiser.

Records from last year show he didn’t make any contributions to the federal Liberals.