“Divest from the Royal Bank of Canada, close your accounts, tell RBC to stop funding the tar sands project.” This was the advice filmmaker Shannon Walsh gave an audience in Toronto after a screening in 2009 of her documentary on the Alberta tar sands project, H2OIL.

Someone in the audience, noticeably moved by the film’s critical exploration of Alberta’s cash-cow and the planet’s eco-nightmare, had asked Walsh the dreaded question, “OK but what is something we can do right now?” Where many filmmakers would read out the laundry list of tepid actions like writing letters and signing petitions, Walsh gave everyone something concrete and tangible to focus on.

Whether the film has made an impact on RBC’s supportive connections to the tar sands is doubtful, but that might be more of a problem of visibility than apathy — Canadian films are notoriously underserved in the North-of-Hollywood distribution and exhibition matrix. Nevertheless, many had no idea that RBC was so intimately connected to what has been described as the largest and worst industrial project in human history.

The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for Canada’s premiere (and therefore very visible) literary arts, politics, and culture magazine The Walrus.

As a multi-year subscriber I’ve had my ups and downs with Canada’s more nerdy, conservative counterpart to the American magazine Harper’s. Feature prose articles have impressed and enlightened while lack of creator diversity has disappointed. The comics and covers are often aesthetic triumphs while the politics oscillate between liberal and middle Canadiana. But one facet of the magazine remained unremarkable until a few issues before my deadline to renew my subscription. Their ads.

The Walrus had suddenly become the literary mouthpiece for the tar sands by way of key advertising space sold to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (or CAPP, if you’re on the golf course). Ridiculous ads (like the one at left) showing scientists and workers expounding their alleged dedication to the environment — vis-a-vis their work at the tar sands extraction project — suddenly manifested as greasy, opaque spots on the magazine’s bleached pages.

Shocked at this lack of discretion on the part of The Walrus, and perplexed at their unethical advertising policy, I sat down and wrote them a letter, which is included below.

Not only did the team at The Walrus completely ignore my letter, but they cynically lowered the bar for the arts and greenwash-facilitation. Two weeks after my correspondence I received my last copy of The Walrus in the mail. It slid through the mail slot and plunked on the floor like all the other copies had before it, only as it landed the cover splayed out nearly twofold by way of expanding flaps.

Flipping it over, I opened the cover flaps to reveal another glaring lie by the industry that is destroying the Canadian environment, causing health and social problems to First Nations, and ensuring Canada will never come close to meeting any kind of Kyoto emission target. It was a complete physical and ideological transformation of the cover, the face of the magazine, into propaganda for the tar sands project. It was almost a Kafkaesque metamorphosis.

Magazines in Canada receive taxpayer subsidies to survive and The Walrus is not exempt from this special arrangement, receiving over $260,000 from one federal government program in 2010. It also survives by selling ad space, and not only to squeaky-clean companies.

I get that this is a delicate dance between government, art, and commerce – compromises are made all the time. But providing the propaganda arm of Alberta tar sands producers with a platform to mislead the Canadian people and pollute the public sphere with corporate copy is intolerable.

Surely the magazine can develop an ethical, fair and just advertising policy and implement it. There are plenty out there in operation that they can easily review and adapt.

In the meantime I think a combination of tactics are needed to end this ugly relationship between the culture and oil industries — it deploys the innocuous letter-writing kind, such as the one included below, and it includes actions like the one Shannon Walsh suggested concerning their finances: cancelling The Walrus subscriptions and boycotting the magazine until they adapt an ethical ad policy. These will likely be seen as bully tactics by The Walrus, but it is they who are bullying the Canadian public with propaganda about the most important environmental issue facing this country.

I hope our readers consider writing a similar letter (send to: info@walrusmagazine.com) and I hope you too can live without this magazine until they correct their corporate greenwashing ways. Here is my letter:

Dear editors of the Walrus,

Despite enjoying your magazine immensely for the last several years, I will not be renewing my subscription. I simply cannot support your publication with a clear conscience any longer. What has crept onto the pages of your magazine over the last few issues is indefensible for a Canadian media organization of your stature and influence.

In recent issues, The Walrus has published full page adverts for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), a major oil industry lobby group. Working in the media arts and culture sector in Canada, I am sensitive to the issues and tensions that are born out of the sticky relationship between culture and commerce. However, providing crucial real estate for CAPP to spread propaganda for the tar sands is an alliance too damaging to support.

Alberta’s tar sands project—the most important ecological issue facing Canadians today—is a massive environmental and social disaster that is not only affecting our communities and the environment today, but will continue to do damage to future generations.

Those responsible for the tar sands eco-disaster know this. The project has such an ugly public image, especially internationally, that CAPP, alongside the province of Alberta and tar sands investors like RBC, have launched a massive PR campaign to greenwash one of the largest industrial tragedies in history. The Walrus, by publishing such ads, is complicit in this campaign and is therefore complicit in the propagation of Canada’s worst ecological problem. One wonders where The Walrus draws the line — are ads extolling BP’s green policies in the Gulf of Mexico next?

By supporting The Walrus with my subscription I have been performing the unconscionable, enabling unethical corporations who lie to Canadians —in the pages of The Walrus — as they attempt to persuade us that the tar sands is an ecologically sound project. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I am therefore asking The Walrus to develop and implement an ethical and fair advertising policy so that I may once again support and enjoy this important Canadian publication.

With regrets,

Ezra Winton

PhD Candidate, Communication Studies – Carleton University
Co-founder and Programmer, Cinema Politica
Contributing Editor – Art Threat

Illustration by Kevin Lo.

• Alberta
• Tar Sands
• The Walrus