LAST WEEK in the House of Commons, the federal Liberal heavy artillery on the environment issue fell silent.
It was a strange eerie silence on the eastern front of the political wars because the environmental regiment of the diminished on-its-heels Liberal political army had been one of its most effective.
The Conservative government will trash the economy and the world, it argued, by ignoring the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions and the need to accept the Liberal promise to reduce them.
The Conservative government is in the pocket of Alberta’s polluting oil industry, don’t you know? Calgary MP and prime minister Stephen Harper is in bed with oil company executives.
Read Also
Agriculture needs to prepare for government spending cuts
As government makes necessary cuts to spending, what can be reduced or restructured in the budgets for agriculture?
It was considered a Liberal strong suit in the battle for urban Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal voters who worry about global warming, pollution, smog and environmental diseases. They wonder where Conservatives come down if the tradeoff is the environment versus economic growth.
So why would the Liberal guns go silent? Why would Liberals quit asking about the Conservative neglect of pressing global warming g issues?
Let’s just say Johanne Gélinas, the commissioner of the environment and sustainable development responsible to Parliament, had a role in the silence.
Last week, she tabled a report that put the lie to all Liberal claims about being the environment, global warming party.
She reported that for all the rhetoric, for all the multi-billion dollar spending announcements, for all the trumpeting of the Kyoto Accord on greenhouse gas reduction, successive Liberal governments were playing a shell game.
They promised fidelity to Kyoto goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions six percent below 1990 levels but allowed emissions to increase almost 30 percent.
They announced programs to do good green policy-making and neglected to create targets, goals or cross-government commitment to achieve those goals.
They read earlier criticisms from the environment commissioner and decided to make more unrealistic promises rather than to dig in and correct the flaws.
In other words, the green mantle the Liberals like to wear was just another case of over-promising and under-delivering.
It’s a big part of why Paul Martin, who spent most of his adult life laying the groundwork to be prime minister, became one of the shortest serving leaders in Canadian history. He and his government and the Jean Chrétien government before it over-promised and under-delivered on the environment, like many other things.
“The response to weaknesses we identified in the past has been disappointing,” Gélinas said in her report. “On the basis of this year’s work, I am more troubled than ever by the federal government’s long-standing failure to confront one of the greatest challenges of our time. Our future is at stake.”
Liberals cringe and fall silent with those words. Conservatives gloat and taunt.
Of course, the Conservatives roll out their own environmental plans this fall and indications are that it will indeed be pro-industry and soft on Alberta’s polluters. Gélinas will likely criticize that next year.
For the moment, Liberal green guns are silenced and their operators embarrassed. The Conservatives are basking.
It won’t last.
