[7] 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.
[notes 1] Cooper, like other members of the Calgary School, strongly advocate against First Nations rights to land and special privilege.
"[11] 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.
[8]: 10 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.
[15][16] 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[notes 2] to fund a University of Calgary-based "public relations project designed to cast doubt on scientific evidence linking human activity to global warming."
In 2014, Friends of Science released a billboard in Calgary, Alberta, claiming that the sun, not human activity, is the primary driver of global warming.
Also called the "Cooper Report,"[20] it had been commissioned by the government of Jason Kenney's Public Inquiry into Anti-Alberta Energy Campaigns.
[7] The initiative was supported by United Conservative Party MLAs, Angela Pitt, Jason Stephan, Drew Barnes, and Todd Loewen.