VANCOUVER, Feb. 26, 2011 (RKR) — BC blogger and researcher Vivian Krause, who has already traced money flowing from several U.S.-based ultra-liberal foundations into Canadian policy debates, told RoadKill Radio Tuesday night that she has found suspicious cash-flows across the border into the BC Liberal Party’s campaign to choose a new leader, and a suspicious coincidence in Liberal Party membership numbers.
“Before the campaign began, the BC Liberal Party had 30,000 members,” Krause told RKR, “and the Wilberforce Foundation in Seattle had 70,000 members. When new memberships closed, the BC Liberal Party had 100,000 members.”
Krause has been investigating foundation funding in US tax returns. She has found a campaign called Organizing for Change, which is a wing of Tides Canada, is getting massive donations from the Wilberforce Foundation.
RKR co-host Terry O’Neill protested the use by radical liberal eco-activists of the name “Wilberforce” (presumably referring to Evangelical politician William Wilberforce, whose 30-year campaign in England’s Parliament succeeded in abolishing slavery in 1830).
Most of the Wilberforce Foundation’s money traces back to James & Rosanna Litwin, said Krause. James Litwin is a co-founder of Microsoft. The foundation has donated laptops for BC Liberal leadership candidates, as well as making cash donations.
Tides Canada has registered $176 million in revenues over the last ten years, Krause added, and has made substantial donations to organizations opposing the Alberta Tar Sands, fighting plans for an oil port on BC’s North Coast, and campaigning against fish farming in BC waters. It has no formal connection to the Tides Foundation of billionaire financier George Soros, but funds nearly identical political movements.
“They now have a $20 million nest-egg,” she told RKR. “If they get 5% interest on that, they have a million dollars a year to fund their political activities.”
She recently had an Op-Ed commentary published in the Vancouver Sun, saying that the Suzuki Foundation should be required to tell the whole story of fish farming. Krause objects to the term “wild salmon”, which puts farmed salmon at a marketing disadvantage. “I call them ‘ranch salmon’,” she says, “because the majority of the fingerlings come from hatcheries and are released into the wild to grow to market size.”
Krause’s web-site, where much more detail is available on American foundations’ influence in Canada, is www.fair-questions.com
Click here for RKR interview with Vivian Krause
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