We’re brimming over with fresh bitumen this week at Maclean’s, where I’ve got a story connecting the Harper government with the Ethical Oil movement, and Colleague Nancy Macdonald has another one, perhaps more significant over the medium term, pointing out that one reason why the government is so eager to pick fights with shady foreign billionaires and oil sheikhs is that that’s easier than defeating northern British Columbia aboriginal communities.
A few people are demanding that I give due credit to some blogs that have already pointed out the connections between, especially, Conservative strategist and website host Hamish Marshall and the PMO. I’m happy to acknowledge that there’s been a lot of coverage of those connections, from Emma Pullman, Vancouver Observer, Deep Climate, The Tyee and probably others. I had a bad few minutes on Monday when I saw that Huffington Post even had a chart, because we’d just put my story to bed with its own chart. I daresay our chart is funnier. But none of my reporting comes from these sources; I got at the Marshall-Marshall-Velshi-Levant daisy chain by asking Conservatives who knew Conservatives.