The Sixth Estate

Climate change and energy is the most important file in the Canadian government right now, with the possible exception of healthcare — and, like healthcare, it’s one on which the Harper Government™ has indicated it would not take any positive action whatsoever. This isn’t surprising because Stephen Harper is on the record stating that he thinks actually trying to do anything to limit and avoid the damages of global climate change is a “socialist scheme.” Over the next century, we will do — or not do — grave damage to the biosphere through climate change. The next years are critical and our government, like the one to the south, is abandoning its responsibilities entirely.

Harper’s position on climate change is much more moderate than certain Conservative politicians, but it’s worth noting that he does believe we are causing permanent global warming. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be massively boosting military assets for the eventually ice-free North (which, left ice-free, wouldn’t need these assets in the first place). His real feelings on the subject came out in a 2002 letter to Canadian Alliance supporters, around the time that Canada was ratifying the Kyoto Accord, in which he described the Kyoto Accord as merely a “socialist scheme to suck money out of” capitalist countries to China using the climate change myth as a pretext:

Note the usual allusion to “contradictory science.” This is a standard corporate tactic to discredit climate change science, just as it was previously a standard corporate tactic to discredit evidence that cigarettes cause lung cancer. In both cases, that’s all it is: a misleading corporate tactic. There is no scientific controversy about climate trends, only a political one.

Other points are not misleading, just ridiculous. For instance, Harper argued that climate change plans shouldn’t focus on carbon dioxide because it’s “essential to life,” showing an abhorrent lack of understanding of the real issue and a future Prime Minister apparently envisioning socialists running around sucking up all the carbon dioxide into giant tanks, leaving CO2-starved plants dying left and right.

Dear Friend,

We’re on a roll, folks! The Canadian Alliance is once again setting the agenda in the House of Commons…

But we can’t just relax and declare victory. We’re gearing up now for the biggest struggle our party has faced since you entrusted me with the leadership. I’m talking about the “battle of Kyoto” — our campaign to block the job-killing, economy-destroying Kyoto Accord.

It would take more than one letter to explain what’s wrong with Kyoto, but here are a few facts about this so-called “Accord”:

• It’s based on tentative and contradictory scientific evidence about climate trends.
• It focuses on carbon dioxide, which is essential to life, rather than upon pollutants…
• Implementing Kyoto will cripple the oil and gas industry, which is so essential to the economies of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia.
• As the effects trickle through other industries, workers and consumers everywhere in Canada will lose. THERE ARE NO CANADIAN WINNERS UNDER THE KYOTO ACCORD.
• The only winners will be countries such as Russia, India, and China… Kyoto is essentially a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations…

But the “battle of Kyoto” is just beginning… We will go to the wall to stop that legislation… The Reform Party defeated the Charlottetown Accord in an epic struggle in the fall of 1992. Now the Canadian Alliance is leading the battle against the Kyoto Accord!

But we can’t do it alone. It will take an army of Canadians to beat Kyoto… We can’t stop Kyoto just in Parliament. We need your help at all levels. We need you to inform yourself about Kyoto, discuss it with your friends and neighbours, and to write protest letters to newspapers and the government.

Yours truly,

Stephen Harper, M.P.