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At the time, I asked Cooper whether he knew some of the money would be used to pay for advertising during the 2005-2006 election campaign about the then-Liberal government's decision to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. https://twitter.com/mikedesouza/status/1349888790899339272
Barry Cooper's response at the time: "I'm not answering those kinds of questions because there's a lot of ambiguity (on what the radio ads were) and I'm not going to clarify them for you...
"These are facts that may be at issue in some kind of legal case, and that's why I'm being evasive..."
This article was published two months before the Globe and Mail would write about a censored version of the audit that the University released in response to my freedom of information request.
I subsequently filed a new #cdnfoi request to get access to all of the receipts that went through the research accounts set up by Barry Cooper at the university. The university initially refused to release these. But...
I complained to the information commissioner's office, triggering an investigation that culminated about three years later in 2011, when the University of Calgary agreed to release receipts showing details how Friends of Science was spending money from the research accounts.
Their response included documents like this invoice from an international public relations and lobbying firm, hired to produce a documentary video to promote climate denial.
There were also hotel receipts and flights for international and domestic travel.
This included travel during the Canadian election campaign for Friends of Science representatives to protest outside the international climate change summit which was hosted in Montreal in 2005.
This included travel during the Canadian election campaign for Friends of Science representatives to protest outside the international climate change summit which was hosted in Montreal in 2005.
They also paid for two newspaper ads in the Montreal Gazette that denied climate change was happening and invited people to attend a three-day event hosted by Friends of Science.
The receipts also included a bill for a $1,004.24 dinner at the Calgary Petroleum Club, attended by Cooper and various Friends of Science members.
And also receipts for donations that were made to other climate denial groups in the U.S. and the United Kingdom.
Did I also mention that some of the receipts showed some money from the research funds was also used to purchase gifts for other climate change doubters?
In 2011, Barry Cooper said “There was a debate going on at the time (about global warming) and it was not being discussed outside a tiny cadre of climatologists...
Barry Cooper went on to tell the Calgary Herald in that Sept 2011 interview: “Moreover, I still view this issue as a public policy matter more than a scientific one. How else would a political scientist be expected to view such matters?”
According to the Wayback Machine, at some point between July 15, 2019 and Aug. 30, 2019, this University of Calgary web page - detailing its audit of the "research accounts" used by the Friends of Science - mysteriously disappeared. https://web.archive.org/web/20190715083426/https://www.ucalgary.ca/news/april2008/audit
