Bruce Livesey. Canadian Dimension. Volume 28, Issue 4, August-September 1994.
One wintry day this past January, Andrea Ritchie had the opportunity to humiliate her former boss in public. The setting was a Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) conference on labour and the environment held at a plush downtown Toronto hotel. An invited speaker was Jeanne Moffat, the executive director of Greenpeace Canada, who told an audience of 200 during one plenary that “Greenpeace has always worked with labour”, and while many people may be concerned about Greenpeace’s turbulent relations with its staff union, “we are working to resolve that.”
Moffat’s remarks enraged Ritchie, a 25-year-old labour activist, feminist and former Greenpeace researcher and canvasser. She leapt to her feet to chastise Moffat, telling the crowd about Greenpeace’s attempts to bust the environmental organization’s Toronto staff union, using an infamous management-side law firm to conduct first-contract negotiations, and firing or laying off union supporters. Ritchie was roundly applauded, with one audience member angrily telling Moffat: “This is the House of Labour and we are not interested in working with you.”
“Moffat was pretty much destroyed,” recalls Ritchie.
In a way, Moffat’s appearance at the CLC conference reflects the arrogance of Greenpeace Canada’s current leadership. And her disingenuous comments also reveal how Canada’s largest, richest and highest-profile environmental group is swimming in bizarre ideological waters these days. Headquartered in Toronto with a staff of 32, Greenpeace Canada is the Canadian branch of Greenpeace International, the global Amsterdam-based environmental organization that has 30 offices worldwide.
While Greenpeace was never closely tied to other social movements, the Left usually considered it a fellow traveler. Greenpeace’s battles with multinational corporations, proclivity for civil disobedience and direct action, and refusal to accept government or corporate donations, placed it on the side of the angels. Moreover, no other group bears as much claim to putting environmental issues on the public agenda, or has chalked up as many victories on this front.
Where is Greenpeace headed?
Yet, over the past two years, Greenpeace Canada has gone through a metamorphosis. “The basic underpinnings of the organization are being defused,” says Joyce McLean, a former chair of Greenpeace Canada’s board of directors.
Indeed, the environmental organization has eradicated campaigns, gotten rid of most of its veteran campaigners, and viciously fought a union drive by its staff. Moreover, it appears to be embracing more conservative and contradictory political positions. This past February, for instance, a spokesperson for Greenpeace Quebec said they weren’t opposed to the sport hunting of woodchucks because the furry critters aren’t an endangered species.
Greenpeace is still grabbing headlines, though. It’s currently funding an international campaign against logging in Clayoquot Sound, and can point to victories in this battle: two British paper companies canceled contracts to buy pulp from MacMillan Bloedel Ltd. because of Greenpeace’s threats to boycott their products. MacMillan Bloedel was soon running ads in BC newspapers, complaining about Greenpeace’s tactics. Greenpeace has also ticked off elements of the political elite over Clayoquot Sound, with both BC Premier Mike Harcourt and Federal Environment Minister Sheila Copps blasting it in the press.
Yet Greenpeace’s Clayoquot Sound campaign is rather misleading. It’s largely targeted at Europeans, not Canadians. Moreover, in Canada, the fight to stop logging in the sound is being led by environmental groups like the Friends of Clayoquot Sound—not Greenpeace.
So, what is Greenpeace Canada at this point in time? Is it in the vanguard of the environmental movement, fighting ruthless corporate polluters and saving the country’s vanishing ecosystems from destruction? Or is it a union-busting, corporatist public relations machine geared only to raising money?
Greenpeace is neither and both. But it is more the latter than the former. In fact, former employees contend that Greenpeace Canada is no longer as devoted to challenging corporate and governmental polluters, and is cut off from the grass roots of Canada’s social and environmental movements. “Greenpeace has, in the past, taken anti-corporate actions,” says Stan Gray, a nuclear campaigner who was fired by Greenpeace last year. “They are now in the process of changing that.”
Of course, Greenpeace Canada has never boasted much in the way of in-house democracy and equal opportunity. Female staffers have long complained about sexism in the workplace, while Greenpeace’s leadership is usually described as arrogant, cliquish, elitist and insensitive to class and racial concerns. “There is a lack of human management, to say the least,” observes Christine Houghton, 33, a former Greenpeace toxics campaigner. “Yet they aren’t supposed to be this huge corporate entity which casts people aside.”
First hint of demise
The first hint that Greenpeace Canada was having internal troubles emerged last year. Stan Gray and Gord Perks, a pulp and paper campaigner, complained to Toronto’s media about the organization’s plans to lay off staff, arguing that it was a smoke screen for union-busting. For their candor, both men were fired.
A few months earlier, in December of 1992, a dozen members of Greenpeace’s Toronto support and campaign staff had formed a union, called the Toronto Greenpeace Staff Association (TGSA), in response to the arbitrary manner in which staff were given the chop. “When it came to layoffs, there was no rhyme nor reason why someone was let go—they picked whoever they wanted,” says Gray.
It was glaringly evident that Greenpeace’s management was unhappy and alarmed about having a union in their midst. Given that Greenpeace is a white, middle-class organization with few links to working people, this was not unexpected. “Stan (Gray) and I had union backgrounds,” recalls David Peerla, 35, a forestry consultant who joined Greenpeace Canada in 1990 and built the organization’s west coast forestry campaign before he quit two years ago. “But most people at Greenpeace had no labour biography. It isn’t surprising that when confronted with a union organizing, they weren’t open to it.”
Peerla says Greenpeace functions as a “web of intimacy”, whereby cliques of like-minded friends run the organization. If you fall out of the web, he says, you are considered an enemy.” (Greenpeace’s leaders) were very threatened by a union because it threatens the intimacy,” notes Peerla.
Unions just “don’t suit greenpeace”
Greenpeace’s leaders also thought a union was a bad fit. David Kraft, a member of the three-person executive who ran Greenpeace Canada in 1992, says he’s not opposed to unions in principle, but believes they don’t suit Greenpeace. “I thought the model of labour relations that exists is ill-suited to the reality of Greenpeace,” Kraft told me, before complaining: “The management of Greenpeace got recast as capitalist, as if we were Toyota Corporation.”
Maybe so, but not without good reason. Greenpeace’s leaders, paranoid about losing control of the organization, were acting like corporate managers. After all, they were used to a workplace that was undemocratic and where decision-making was arbitrary. Michael Manolson, the executive director of Greenpeace Canada from 1988 to 1992, is blunt about the role of Greenpeace’s managers. “I had to make decisions. You hire people, you fire some people,” he explains. “People felt that they were owed something by the movement and by the organization. It was different when I joined. Of course no one likes getting screwed over, but part of me feels |Come on kids, grow up’.”
Greenpeace Canada’s response to the union was to announce, in the spring of 1993, lay offs and the phasing out of its ozone, nuclear energy, Great Lakes and part of its forestry campaigns. To the TGSA, it looked like retaliation, especially since most of those being let go were union supporters.
Greenpeace justified the lay offs by saying that they were coping with a financial crisis brought on by the recession. “The reality of Greenpeace Canada was that it could not keep functioning by carrying all the campaigns it had, and keep its head above water,” maintains jeanne Moffat, who had taken over as Greenpeace Canada’s new executive director in January of last year. But this was not the entire picture. While it was true that Greenpeace Canada’s revenues had tumbled from a high of $11.5 million in 1991 to under $8 million by 1993, the union considered the cuts too drastic, especially since they had drafted a financial plan which allowed for staff to be retained by simply rejigging the budget. Greenpeace’s management refused to consider this proposal though.
Instead, the layoffs went ahead. But when the labour movement threatened it with a boycott, Greenpeace Canada called a truce with the union. It was a short-lived one, however. Last September, Greenpeace fired Ann Chiu, a member of the union’s executive who works in Greenpeace’s accounting department, over a minor dispute about vacation entitlement. No one had ever been dismissed over this issue before. Chiu was reinstated, but by Ontario’s labour board.
Meanwhile, first contract talks were going nowhere fast. Gray, who’s acted as the union’s unpaid negotiator, says Greenpeace was seeking clauses that would have allowed the organization to get rid of all current staff. “They were offering very weak job security provisions. We believe they were out to restructure and eliminate us,” he says. Finally, in disgust, the union filed for first contract arbitration this past January.
Defending corporate polluters
Adding to the tension was Greenpeace’s use of a heavyweight management-side Toronto law firm, Mathews Dinsdale & Clark. Not only has Greenpeace Canada paid these lawyers about $100,000 in fees—undermining its arguments about having to get rid of staff because of a dearth of funds—but the firm has a history of defending corporate polluters. This past March, Gray discovered that Mathews Dinsdale & Clark had represented Varnicolor Chemicals Ltd. after the company was charged—and later convicted—of illegally disposing toxic wastes at its Elmira, Ontario site in 1990. The lawyer who defended Varnicolor also acted on behalf of Greenpeace Canada in its dealings with the union. As of this writing, Greenpeace has yet to change law firms.
Does Greenpeace Canada’s behavior towards its Toronto staff union suggest a shift in the environmental organization’s priorities?
Yes and no. Greenpeace Canada’s actions are, in some respects, in keeping with its history. After all, the organization is not, and never has been, an anti-capitalist, left-wing, democratic organization. Still, as Andrea Ritchie, who quit Greenpeace last year and now works for the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, says: “I’ve learned a lot about so-called progressive organizations and how they can be regressive organizations, especially how they can be anti-union and don’t want to be part of social justice movements.”
Herb Gunther is resident boy-genius of The Public Media Centre, a San Francisco-based advertising think tank. He helped design the advertising campaign that put Greenpeace on the map: the one featuring cute baby harp seals with the heading “Kiss this baby goodbye” that brought public attention to Canada’s seal hunt in the late ’70s.
Gunther argues that political movements go through phases: In phase one, the movement consists of a tiny group of creative activists; in phase two, it attracts public and media attention; by phase three the movement has become romanticized; in the final phase the honeymoon ends, where illusions have evaporated and the emperor is discovered to have no clothes.
Gunther argues that Greenpeace has followed this sequence. Indeed, Greenpeace was founded in 1971 in Vancouver when 12 anti-war activists set sail in an old fishing boat to prevent a U.S. nuclear weapons test at Amchitka Island, just off the coast of Alaska. While the boat never reached the test site, the publicity generated by the action ended nuclear testing in that region.
The nucleus of Greenpeace’s founders represented a stew pot of conflicting lifestyles—Quakers, former Sierra Clubbers, hippies, draft dodgers and socialists. An element of mysticism imbued the group, with the I Ching favoured reading material. Dan McDermott, 47, who became active with Greenpeace in 1975, says anti-capitalism was never one of the organization’s basic tenets. “(Greenpeace) had a wide spectrum of politics,” he recalls, saying it focused on the consequences of human growth, rather than battling the corporate Establishment. It was more of “‘Stop It’ organization” says McDermott. Indeed, Greenpeacers would say they were “Not Left or Right but Green”.
In the early days, Greenpeace fought nuclear weapons testing and whale and seal hunting. Co-founder and journalist Bob Hunter came up with the idea of “mind bombs,” whereby direct-action media spectacles were engineered to generate public interest in environmental issues. Soon Greenpeace’s orange Zodiac inflatable dinghies were all over the news as they sped after whaling ships and into nuclear test zones. The first crack in the edifice occurred in 1977 when veteran activist Paul Watson was kicked out of Greenpeace. His crime was knocking a club from the hand of a seal hunter during the anti-sealing campaign. Watson, who went on to found the more radical Sea Shepard Conservation Society, has said he was thrown out because Greenpeace’s board of directors had been “infiltrated by people who were into the legislative and business aspects of the organization, not activists.” Watson said the club incident upset their plans for corporate growth, and calls Greenpeace’s door-to door fund-raisers “the Fuller Brush men of the environmental movement.”
A mess of warring factions
Watson’s criticisms ring more true today, for back in the ’70s Greenpeace actually had very little money. Moreover, by 1977, the organization was a mess of warring factions. That year, David McTaggert, a Vancouver developer, yachtsman, and badminton player, appeared on the scene to pay off the organization’s debts. Two years later he created Greenpeace International, put himself at the helm, and moved the head office from Vancouver to Washington. Today, Greenpeace International resides in Amsterdam, where it oversees global campaigns, offices around the world and a budget in the neighborhood of US $100 million.
Still, for a long time, Greenpeace Canada was a loose outfit. “There was no control over us, no structure,” recalls John Bennett, 42, a former international oil campaigner who became active with Greenpeace in 1975 but was laid off last December.
Money floods in
Joyce McLean, 42, who joined Greenpeace Canada in 1981 and was chairperson from 1983-86, recalls that the organization took off after French secret agents bombed the Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand nine years ago. “Growth was just unbelievable,” she says. But as money flooded in, the need for expert management grew. By 1988, with $2.4 million in revenues and campaigns against nuclear power, acid rain and toxic wastes in the Great Lakes in full swing, Greenpeace Canada’s executive decided to hire an executive director with managerial know-how.
Their choice was Michael Manolson. A veteran Greenpeacer, Manolson had an MBA from McGill University. He moved Greenpeace Canada’s head office from Vancouver to Toronto, hired more campaigners, increased the number of campaigns, and established a sophisticated fundraising operation. By 1991, Greenpeace Canada was raising more than $11 million a year.
Depending on who you talk to, Manolson is described either as a competent manager or an asshole. On one hand, he was responsible for the hiring of some of Greenpeace’s most talented campaigners, like Gord Perks and Stan Gray. He participated in direct actions himself and readily spent money on campaigns.
On the other hand, some Greenpeacers found Manolson imperious and prone to favouritism. In 1990 he fired Joyce McLean, one of Greenpeace’s most talented activists, giving the job she’d been seeking to his lover. Manolson never told McLean why she was let go. “It was a deeply hurtful period of my life,” recalls McLean, now a policy adviser to Ontario’s environment minister, Bud Wildman. “When you work for an organization like Greenpeace, you give your heart and soul. You are not there because of the money, you are there for the cause.”
A year later, Manolson also fired Dan McDermott, who had been with Greenpeace for 16 years. McDermott never was given a reason for his dismissal either. Now working for a Toronto environmental group called Earthroots, McDermott believes he was terminated because he criticized Manolson’s management.
Meanwhile, hanging over Manolson’s head was a charge of sexual harassment brought by a female staff member.
Manolson is unapologetic about his helmanship of Greenpeace Canada, a post he left in early 1992 after falling out with the organization’s board of directors. “Danny’s departure was not easy for any of us,” he says. “Nobody’s been fucked over by Greenpeace. Nobody’s been trashed.”
It’s a white man’s world
Many would disagree, especially the women who worked there. They were usually given the unglamourous grunt work and little of the glory. Andrea Ritchie, who joined the organization in the fall of 1991 as a canvasser, remarks: “There was a male style of campaigning—very aggressive and not very consultative, not very collective and not supportive of women.”
The case of Sarita Srivastava, 28, is revealing. An intelligent, articulate, well-educated woman, she was hired by Greenpeace in 1991 and eventually became an ozone layer campaigner. But Srivastava’s co-campaigner was very hostile to her. “He wanted absolute power control,” she recalls. The man would scream at Srivastava in front of other staff. Finally, in the spring of 1992, she filed a written and verbal grievance against Greenpeace Canada about his behavior. But Greenpeace was slow in responding, and then poo-pooed her complaint, refusing to reprimand the campaigner. In disgust, she quit Greenpeace. “Men dominate Greenpeace. Things are geared towards a traditionally masculine way,” says Srivastava
Greenpeace is also weak on racial sensitivity. When its seal campaign was in full swing in the 1970s, little concern was paid to the impact on Natives. Indeed, the Inuit communities on Canada’s East coast saw their markets for seal pelts dry up and local economies shattered.
Pat Chastang, a 31-year-old African-American from Los Angeles, who joined Greenpeace USA in 1986 and came to Toronto two years later to help set up Greenpeace Canada’s fundraising operation, says the organization doesn’t connect the environment with race, even though many corporations build pollution-spewing factories in neighborhoods where people of color reside. Chastang worked on a Greenpeace campaign against the expensive electric heating many low-income housing complexes are burdened with. But this campaign, important to many people of color, was killed in 1992. “Greenpeace Canada is not interested in working on issues like that,” Chastang says. She too left Greenpeace last year. The organization now has no women of color on its campaign staff or in leadership positions.
The downward plunge
As long as money was plentiful, though, tensions among staff remained underground. Greenpeace Canada grew at a stupendous rate from 1988 until 1991, swelling to nearly 60 staff and funding a dozen campaigns. But then the organization made a miscalculation, predicting that growth would continue through the 1990s, despite the fact that the recession was underway. At the same time, its fundraising operation was being mismanaged. Consequently, donations dropped dramatically in 1992, down to $7.8-million. At one point, Greenpeace Canada considered declaring bankruptcy, and only survived with a loan from Greenpeace International. The financial crisis affected the staff, with morale plummeting. Fearful for its future, the organization grew intolerant of its most controversial campaigners. In Toronto, this meant that the days of shit disturbers like Stan Gray and Gord Perks were numbered.
Gray, 49, had joined Greenpeace Canada in 1990 after the Ontario Workers’Health Centre—a union-funded health and safety clinic he had been running—went bust. He was an anomaly at Greenpeace, coming from a trade union background, although he’d been hired to strengthen Greenpeace’s ties with labour. In 1991 he helped create the Green Work Alliance (GWA), a coalition of unions trying to establish a green industrial economy. Gray says while Green-peace’s leadership was initially supportive of the GWA, they soon cooled to it. “If they had a choice of working to empower labor in communities, or to empower green businesses, the leadership did not want to work with labour,” he says. Greenpeace is no longer active with the GWA.
Gray came to believe that Greenpeace was becoming more conciliatory towards corporations and less interested in campaigns that had a labour focus. “They everything tailored to a business criteria,” he asserts.
Gord Perks, 30, joined Greenpeace in 1989 after working for Pollution Probe, a Toronto-based environmental group. Perks was young, radical and a brilliant campaigner who shot to stardom when he interrupted the press conference that then Ontario Premier David Peterson gave to announce the 1990 provincial election. Perks handcuffed a tape recorder to his arm that played a recording of the premier’s broken environmental promises. The stunt made all the national newscasts. Perks fought to ban the use of chlorine in the forest industry, and was so effective that Ontario’s government announced last year it would do just that.
Initially, he was very happy at Greenpeace. “For an activist, it was like walking into heaven,” says Perks. “How many activists have a $20,000 budget and complete freedom to do what you want?”
Priorities misplaced
But Perks began to notice a change in Greenpeace Canada’s priorities. He says campaigners began to disappear and not be replaced. “People who had no experience in campaigning began to take control,” he says. “The institution began to take an imperative over the campaigns.”
Perks believes that the leadership of Greenpeace saw itself as the environmental movement, not just part of it. In his opinion, Greenpeace’s new-found status went to their heads, and they no longer saw the need for campaigners.
Perks and Gray point to how Greenpeace Canada spends its money to validate this argument. Currently, Greenpeace Canada has seven campaigners in Canada—down from more than 20—who focus their energies primarily on two campaigns, fisheries and forests (there are also campaigns against the toxic waste trade, chlorine, climate change and James Bay). Yet Greenpeace Canada’s own budget figures show that these campaigns receive, on average, a total of about 6% of gross revenues per annum. In 1993, Greenpeace Canada spent 8% of gross revenues on campaigns, or about $570,000 of its $7.5 million budget.
When I interviewed Jeanne Moffat last November, the issue of how Greenpeace Canada spends its loot was discussed. She told me that 68% of all revenues goes to campaigns. But she includes door-to-door canvassers and some administrative staff in her calculation—which critics contend are not campaign staff.
Moffat is not the sort of person you imagine as Greenpeace Canada’s executive director. Prior to taking over in early 1993, she had no experience with the organization or as an environmental activist. For 11 years she’d administered an obscure, church-funded agency called Ten Days For World Development. While one envisions environmental activists as scruffy, irreverent, sandal-wearing youths, Moffat is the prim and proper picture of middle-class, middle-aged propriety. She has a rather patronizing, schoolmarmish personality.
In fact, former oil campaigner John Bennett tells a story about how Moffat threatened to suspend him because instead of answering phones at the Toronto office one day, he was in Europe organizing a direct action against oil spills. “I have this international job and my national executive director says it is more important to answer the phones while I am in the midst of this important international action,” he says in disgust. Indeed, it’s hard to envision Moffat hanging her hide out of a Zodiac dinghy, dodging whaler’s harpoons.
Still, Moffat asserts that Greenpeace Canada has not changed. “I haven’t seen anything to indicate a softer line to the corporate sector,” she declares. “Greenpeace is still very committed to fighting corporations who destroy the environment.”
Moffat points to Greenpeace Canada’s Clayoquot Sound and toxic trade campaigns as proof that Greenpeace is still battling environmental villains. However, she did say “there is a desire not to be an organization of doing those direct action media events. We want to be seen as doing research too.” Yet no matter how often Moffat denies it, Greenpeace Canada has changed. It’s no longer willing to bend the rules and is definitely more top heavy and hidebound. “Before, we used to be able to call the office and say we need five people to do a demo and 10 people would show up,” John Bennett told me before he was laid off last winter. “Now it’s so bureaucraticized that they’ve taken the spontaneity and imagination out of what we do.”