If you’re one of the 65,000-odd supporters of The Canadian Taxpayer Federation, your dollars are fighting government waste and improving public accountability. Good for you!

But you’re also underwriting climate denial.

DeSmogBlog obtained a recent letter sent by Maureen Bader, the group’s B.C. director (shown here), to a former member who was concerned about the Federation’s position on climate change.  In the letter, she characterizes the so-far limited government efforts to address global warming as a “tax grab.” She also calls the U.S. effort to develop a cap-and-trade system “a blatant effort to erect non-tariff barriers to trade.”

Governments, both provincially and federally use conventional wisdom, so-called consensus and even stoop to fear as an excuse to raise taxes.  They are using people’s legitimate concern about the environment as an excuse for a tax grab.

Bader turns to the usual denier playbook: science cherry-picking, pulling data out of context and twisting peer-reviewed science to claim, as she does, that “There is no consensus that man-made CO2 causes global warming.” Right, except for the 800+ contributing authors and more 450+ lead authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Later in the letter, Bader – a former employee of the public affairs bureau of the B.C. Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources – shares this bit of tortured logic:

For taxpayers, the globe is cooling while CO2 concentration continues to rise, so every penny of taxpayers’ money spent on reducing CO2 is wasted but if the money had been spent on health care instead, everyone would be far better off and in a better position to adapt to whatever change the future will bring.

While Bader sings “Que Sera Sera,” the World Health Organization estimates 150,000 deaths now occur in low-income countries each year due to climate change from four climate-sensitive health outcomes – crop failure and malnutrition, diarrhoeal disease, malaria and flooding. Almost 85% of these excess deaths are in young children.

Her comments on global warming and public health are not only naive, they’re morally abhorrent. The Federation’s members should take note.

Whenever something like this surfaces, we like to follow the money. The Federation doesn’t release financial statements, and reveals little of its funding except to say that it is member-supported. Meanwhile, according to federal public records, the following individuals are listed as directors.

Peter Green
Michael R. Binnion
Jim Silye
Norm Reise
Aady Crooks
John Mortimer

So it’s everybody-in-the-pool time, DeSmogBlog readers. Can anyone out there tell us a little bit more about these gentlemen? We’ll update this post as information comes in.