A week ago, the Toronto Globe and Mail reported that the new Conservative government would not kill Canada’s commitment to the Kyoto agreement (good news!), but had no intention of living up to it.
That seemed, in a perverse way, reasonable. The Liberal government of Jean Chretien went out of its way to avoid dealing with climate change in any useful way. It established an “implementation process” that turned out to be a long and pointless waste of time, and then it “ratified” the Kyoto agreement without any realistic plan to meet Canada’s commitment. After such a performance, it seemed that the Tories were just acknowledging the obvious.
Now, however, we hear (again in the G&M) that Prime Minister Harper’s minions plan a full-scale assault on the few existing programs to address this issue. Thus, we step back from the apparent duplicity of the Liberal position to the conscious double-dealing of the current administration.
At least the British administration of Prime Minister Tony Blair – often condemned for saying much, but doing little – is headed in the right direction. In saying little, but doing much to compromise Canada’s inadequate climate response, Prime Minister Harper is leading us backwards into the darkness.
