Fraser Barry Cooper (born 1943) is a Canadian political scientist at the University of Calgary. Before coming to Calgary, he taught at Bishop's University (1968–1970), McGill University, and York University (1970–1981). The winner of a Killam Research Fellowship, he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 1991, Cooper wrote Action into Nature: An Essay on the Meaning of Technology and he co-authored Deconfederation: Canada without Quebec, in which he argued that Canada would benefit from Quebec separation. He is also the author of the 1999 publication Eric Voegelin and the Foundations of Modern Political Science.
He is a fellow at the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies and a senior research fellow at the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute. As a regular columnist for the Calgary Herald, Cooper is a frequent commentator on Canadian political issues. He attended high school at Shawnigan Lake School, on Vancouver Island, and received degrees from the University of British Columbia and Duke University.
Cooper is an advocate of climate denialism, Quebec separatism, Western Canadian separatism, with Alberta as an independent, sovereign jurisdiction within Canada.
Contents
Calgary School
Cooper is a member of a group of conservative political scientists, the Calgary School, which also includes Tom Flanagan, Rainer Knopff, Ted Morton, and David Bercuson. The group's focus has been to influence public affairs over the long term. Cooper, like other members of the Calgary School, strongly advocate against First Nations rights to land and special privilege. In his arguments in a January 2013 article, he cites controversial publication, First Nations? Second Thoughts, in which he countered arguments presented in the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People(1996). Both this publication and Cooper's article argue against these statements by the RCAP: "(1) Aboriginals are privileged because they were here first; (2) there are no significant differences between European and Indian civilizations so that (3) Indians are sovereign nations; accordingly (4) treaties were nation-to-nation agreements that (5) affirmed aboriginal sovereignty and ownership of the land."
In its early years, in the late 1990s, members of the small Calgary School, a group of Calgary-based political science professors, had some influence on Canadian public policy according to an article by David J. Rovinsky from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a public policy research institution based in Washington, DC. In his "Advice to Progressives from the Calgary School" in the Literary Review of Canada, Tom Flanagan wrote, "Knopff and Morton took on judicial activism. Cooper and Bercuson's Deconfederation undermined the Meech Lake agenda of endless concessions to Quebec. In First Nations? Second Thoughts, I stood up against the juggernaut of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. All these books were widely discussed in the media and have had some impact on the course of public affairs."
Climate change
During his tenure as the director of the Calgary branch of the Fraser Institute from 1999 to 2005, Cooper began to focus on climate change. He invited Bjørn Lomborg, a Danish political scientist who also worked with the Friends of Science to provide arguments against climate change, to Calgary.
The Friends of Science opposes the Kyoto Protocol and claims to offer "critical evidence that challenges the premises of the Kyoto Protocol and presents alternative causes for climate change."
By 2004, Cooper set up the Science Education Fund which could accept donations through the Calgary Foundation. The Calgary Foundation administers charitable giving in the Calgary area and had "a policy of guarding donors' identities." Albert Jacobs, a geologist and retired oil-explorations manager and member of the Canadian Society of Petroleum Geologists who formed the Friends of Science, described how donations from oil and gas industry donors were passed on to the Science Education Fund set up by Barry Cooper, which in turn supported the activities of the Friends of Science.
In 2004, Talisman Energy, a Calgary-based, global oil and gas exploration and production company, one of Canada's largest independent oil and gas companies, donated $175,000 to fund a University of Calgary-based project which journalist Mike De Souza said was a "public relations project designed to cast doubt on scientific evidence linking human activity to global warming." De Souza published the list of significant donations to the Friends of Science which had been received by the press, in an article published in the Vancouver Sun in 2011. Sydney Kahanoff, a Calgary oil and gas executive and philanthropist donated $50,000 through his Kahanoff Foundation, a charity he established in 1979. Murphy Oil matched one of its employees $1,050 donations. Douglas Leahey defended the donations to the Friends of Science from the then CEO of Talisman Energy, James Buckee, who shared the Friends' views on climate change. Cooper's involvement in the funding of that group was called into question in 2006, when it was reported he helped start a University of Calgary fund the Science Education Fund, which accepted monies from Alberta oil and gas companies, foundations, and individuals and then used some of that charitable donation in the Friends of Science group to produce a video, which is available at friendsofscience.org.
Western alienation and Alberta sovereignty
Cooper is an advocate of Western Canadian separatism, Cooper co-authored the September 2021 "Free Alberta Strategy" with lawyers, Rob Anderson and Derek From in which they called for Alberta's recognition as a sovereign jurisdiction within Canada. The initiative was supported by United Conservative Party MLAs, Angela Pitt, Jason Stephan, Drew Barnes, and Todd Loewen.
Selected works
2020 Barry Cooper (2020). Background Report on Changes in the Organization and Ideology of Philanthropic Foundations with a Focus on Environmental Issues as Reflected in Contemporary Social Science Research (PDF) (Report). Public Inquiry into Anti-Alberta Energy Campaigns. Calgary, Alberta: University of Calgary. p. 28. Archived from the original (PDF) on January 16, 2021. Retrieved January 18, 2021.
2005 Moens, A. Alexander; Cooper, Barry (2005). "Canadian participation in North American missile defence: a cost-benefit analysis" (PDF). Fraser Institute. Vancouver. Retrieved January 18, 2021.
2005 Miljan, Lydia; Cooper, Barry (2005), "The Canadian "garrison mentality" and anti-Americanism at the CBC", Fraser Institute, Vancouver
2005 Szeto, Ray; Cooper, Barry (2005), "The need for Canadian strategic lift", Fraser Institute, Vancouver
2004 Cooper, Barry (2004), "Privacy and security in an age of terrorism", Fraser Institute, Vancouver
2004 Cooper, Barry (2004), New political religions, or, an analysis of modern terrorism, Columbia: University of Missouri Press
2003 Miljan, Lydia; Cooper, Barry (2003), "Hidden agendas: how journalists influence the news", UBC Press, Vancouver
2002 Cooper, Barry (2002), "Unholy terror: the origin and significance of contemporary, religion-based terrorism", Fraser Institute, Vancouver
2000 Cooper, Barry; Kanji, Mebs (2000), "Governing in post-deficit times: Alberta in the Klein years", Centre for Public Management, University of Toronto, Toronto
1999 Cooper, Barry (July 21, 1999). Eric Voegelin and the Foundations of Modern Political Science (1 ed.). Columbia: University of Missouri. ISBN 978-0-8262-1229-0. On Eric Voegelin (1901–1985).