Swapping Apples & Oranges

CBC's Evan Solomon is the worst magician ever.

On a recent edition of Power and Politics, Solomon made a decision: to take the side of Sierra Club executive director John Bennett against Ethical Oil Institute spokesperson Kathryn Marshall. In doing so, he attempted a magic trick:

He would take an apple -- Marshall's reference to the generous foreign funding enjoyed by environmental groups attempting to block the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline -- make it disappear, and as with all good magic tricks, make it reappear.

There was just one problem: when Solomon made the apple reappear, it was an orange. But he and Bennett tried to pretend it was still an apple.

Solomon countered Marshall's comments about the foreign funding enjoyed by these environmental groups by asking if the Ethical Oil institute received any funding from Enbridge.

The unintentional punchline is that Enbridge is a Canadian company.

Oops.

Of course, the next trick in the far-left anti-oil sands arsenal is then to attempt to write off the Ethical Oil institute as corporate shills. See, in the eyes of the far-left, even Canadian corporations are inherently evil and villainous, no matter what. Even if they're Canadian.

So then they'll try to make the issue about that: a classic bait-and-switch tactic.

Naturally, it never occurs to them that Enbridge might be donating to the Ethical Oil institute because they share common values, and because the work of the Ethical Oil institute is already beneficial to them.

Heaven forbid corporations donate money to organizations that share their values.