While it has aggressively slammed environmental groups for using foreign dollars to finance a small portion of their budgets, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government is being tight-lipped about revelations that climate change skeptics in Canada are getting money from an American think-tank with corporate funding.
Newly released documents have revealed three Canadians were part of a network of academics receiving monthly payments from the Chicago-based Heartland Institute as part of its advocacy work to cast doubt on scientific evidence linking human activity to global warming observed in recent decades.
Two of the three Canadians mentioned in the internal records have confirmed they were getting paid by the Heartland Institute.
“There’s nothing secret about it,” said Madhav Khandekar, a retired meteorologist based in the Toronto region who was getting about $1,000 per month from the think-tank. “This is a sort of stipend that I get for doing the literature review and providing commentaries on the website. It is posted for people to read.”
The entire Heartland budget is pocket change compared to what the government spends funding climate alarmism. A few thousand dollars a year in comparison is nothing. Nothing.