The Royal Canadian Mounted Polices (aka Mounties) has classified anti-petroleum activists and groups as a security threat recently. Under Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s anti-terrorism initiatives, according to The Globe and Mail, the anti-petroleum movement could face increased scrutiny by Canadian authorities. An RCMP intelligence estimate released to the press by Greenpeace bluntly states that foreign supported groups that a re attempting to prevent oil extraction from Canada’s tar sands and campaigning against the Keystone XL pipeline are willing to use violence.

“There is a growing, highly organized and well-financed anti-Canada petroleum movement that consists of peaceful activists, militants and violent extremists who are opposed to society’s reliance on fossil fuels,” concludes the report which is stamped “protected/Canadian eyes only” and is dated Jan. 24, 2014.

“If violent environmental extremists engage in unlawful activity, it jeopardizes the health and safety of its participants, the general public and the natural environment.”

The is legislation pending in Canada’s parliament that will expand police surveillance powers in order to curb terrorism. Civil liberties groups are concerned about the anti-terrorism bill’s provisions but RCMP has stated they monitor individuals rather than groups and the agency does not begin surveillance of anyone unless there is suspicion of criminal activity. The assessment did express concern about a growing militancy inside anti-petroleum campaigns and that it is grounded in the environmentalist’s claim that human activity resulting from fossil fuel use causes climate change.

Like US law enforcement, Canadian officials can tell the difference between someone lawfully dissenting and another engaged in unlawful or criminal activity. However, the fact that Canada’s federal police force publishes an intelligence estimate where green groups involved in anti-petroleum activism have the potential for violence says something about groups like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club who are named in the report. The base philosophy of environmentalist groups is the hatred of mankind and civilization and they make a concerted effort to make every effort to ensure mankind’s ability to live is hindered. I think Henry Mencken said it best:

[T]he Liberals…pretend — and often quite honestly believe — that they are hot for liberty. They never really are. Deep down in their hearts they know, as good democrats, that liberty would be fatal to democracy — that a government based upon shifting and irrational opinion must keep it within bounds or run a constant risk of disaster. They themselves, as a practical matter, advocate only certain narrow kinds of liberty — liberty, that is, for the persons they happen to favor. The rights of other persons do not seem to interest them. If a law were passed tomorrow taking away the property of a large group of presumably well-to-do persons — say, bondholders of the railroads — without compensation and without even colorable reason, they would not oppose it; they would be in favor of it. The liberty to have and hold property is not one they recognize. They believe only in the liberty to envy, hate and loot the man who has it.