LIBERAL leader Stéphane Dion loves to accuse prime minister Stephen Harper of being a “climate change denier.”
It always draws cheers and smirks from Liberals who know that Dion, rather than being a denier, has proclaimed climate change both real and the greatest threat facing the planet.
Of course, the Liberal leader would know since the Liberal government in which he was a key player presided over a period in which greenhouse gas emissions in Canada increased faster than in any other major industrialized country.
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Presumably, when he became environment minister in Paul Martin’s government in 2004, Dion would have received a briefing about the environmental and greenhouse emission record during the previous 11 years of Liberal rule.
It wasn’t pretty. According to a Statistics Canada report on the effect of human activity on greenhouse gas emissions published last week, Canada had the worst record among the Group of Eight industrialized countries from 1990 to 2004. Eleven of those 14 years were Liberal years.
Of course, there were reasons. Canada’s economy was booming and its population grew by more than 16 percent, more than double most other G8 countries.
More people and more economic activity equal more pollution. And of course, as a northern country with significant winter heating costs, Canada also consumes more energy. So it is not a great surprise that greenhouse gas emissions increased.
The surprise is that in the simplified and overheated world of political rhetoric, critics seem to think the Kyoto Protocol targets of reductions from 1990 levels can be easily achievable if only Harper and environment minister John Baird had the will.
As the 1993 Liberals inherited an out-of-control deficit and debt fiasco from the Progressive Conservatives, so the 2006 Conservatives inherited a Liberal Kyoto commitment that is simply unattainable because of the legacy of the Liberal years.
But politics never lets facts get in the way of a good argument.
So why won’t the Harper Conservatives get tougher with emitters? Of course, because the oilsands project in Harper’s Alberta is the real culprit and the government doesn’t want to offend its buddies in the oil patch.
The Statistics Canada report offers interesting facts on that assumption as well.
It is absolutely true that the mining and oil and gas extraction industry is increasing emissions. However, in 2005, that sector accounted for just 2.6 percent of energy-related emissions.
By contrast, drivers contributed 33 percent of all emissions.
Agriculture, responsible for at least eight percent of 2005 emissions or 57 million tonnes of greenhouse gases, increased its contribution by 24 percent after 1990 and that does not count fossil fuel use on farms.
Electricity and heat production accounted for 21 percent of energy related emissions.
The bottom line is that while the oil industry and its oilsands component are the critics’ whipping boy for climate change and Conservative failure, city folks driving their SUVs to the local theatre to listen to a lecture on Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth are as much or more of the problem.
And the Liberal legacy is a greenhouse gas emission level out of whack with their Kyoto demands.
