In a suspicious “leak ” to the Globe and Mail, the Canadian government has announced a “tough new green plan” that will force oil sands projects and coal-fired power plants to capture and store CO2.

This would be good if it were true, but the Globe article says the federal Conservative government is still using intensity targets and has given a free pass to all projects that are already “hit the drawing board.” At last report, oil sands developers had existing plans to triple their operations by 2012, so the Tory plan may be similar to the Alberta government plan: which is, effectively, to let the oil patch do whatever it wants.

Now that the government has engineered this very favourable headline, it will be interesting to see what the fine print says when the actual policy is released later this week.