Canada’s biggest oil lobbyist is using the venerated National Museum of History to spread tar sands propaganda to unsuspecting children and tourists.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) has a sweet sponsorship deal with the trusted institution in the hopes it can trick visitors into believing the oil industry is not really destroying our planet or ignoring Indigenous rights. This is a straight-up bribe to buy social license for Big Oil—that it knows it can’t earn without paying out.

CAPP has previously been caught using its money to influence and even rewrite exhibits at other national museums it thought didn’t project a positive image of the Tar Sands—and there’s no reason to believe it won’t do the same here.

Tell the National Museum not to let Big Oil rewrite history.

When Enbridge tried to put its ads in every Tim Hortons restaurant across the country to promote its Northern Gateway pipeline, 30,000 SumOfUs members objected almost overnight. Tim Hortons pulled the ad and guess what? Northern Gateway died too. We need to do it again and keep Big Oil’s propaganda out of our national museums.

CAPP will get its logo plastered all over the Museum of History and oil lobbyists will get free passes to openings and special events—along with influential politicians. Over the past year alone, CAPP has lobbied the federal government almost 900 times trying to gut environmental protections and get even more subsidies for the oil industry.

But brand promotion and intimate access to Ottawa’s power brokers aren’t the only perks. When CAPP thought an exhibit in the National Museum of Science and Technology didn’t tell a “positive” enough story about the disastrous Tar Sands, it wrote the museum and asked for changes. In response, the museum removed pictures of the heavy hauler trucks used to lug massive bitumen loads from the drill sites.

Don’t let the oil industry turn the Museum of History into a propaganda machine. Cut ties with Big Oil now!

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