It's no secret that the Con cabinet includes a number of climate-change skeptics, and it's only been in the past few weeks, especially since the release of the UN Report, that Harper has even officially recognized the problem.
But they're still unwilling or unable to return to Kyoto, in spite of the fact that in recent polls the Canadian public has raised the enviornment to one or the other of the top two issues facing the country. The best answer the Cons seem to have is to denegrate the record of the previous Liberal government on the environment. Not coincidentally, the new leader of the Liberal Party, Stephane Dion, was a Liberal Minister of the Environment.
The new Con Minister of the Environment, John Baird, tried a new tack in Question Period last week:
"Canada (is) once again providing leadership in the world, fighting above its weight class and showing moral authority to the rest of the world. That's what Canada's known for," Baird read.
"Do we know who said that yesterday? Al Gore."
However, in a statement today, Gore made clear he's not about to accept this "endorsement" from the Crazed Cons:
"I understand that last week Canada's minister of the environment, John Baird, mischaracterized comments I made last summer as praise for the Harper government's actions on global warming," Gore wrote.
"The comments I made were designed to encourage the Harper government not to abandon Canada's tradition of fighting above its weight class on the world stage as part of the Kyoto process.
"It is my experience that other nations do look to Canada for moral leadership. . . Nothing less than the future habitability of the planet is at stake. I urge the Harper government to do the right thing."
It's worth noting Baird's lie about "yesterday", when in fact the comments were made last summer. Canada's Cons have learned well from the Repub playbook.
Annnnnd, just in case you might think this is a unique case of misrepresentation by the Cons of an environmental expert's position, check this out:
Daphne Wysham, an academic at the Institute for Policy Studies, said she was "horrified'' last fall when then-environment minister Rona Ambrose appeared to suggest she supported the government's concerns about the Kyoto accord.
One month later, at a United Nations environment summit, Ambrose suggested that senior UN climate official Yvo de Boer was sympathetic to Canada's position. But De Boer said he was actually confused about the Canadian position.
Full story here
Yes, they are pond scum, but they only have a minority government and they'll be outta there possibly as soon as they try to pass a budget this spring.
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