Prime Minister Stephen Harper this week declined an invitation from Opposition Leader Stéphane Dion to debate with him in Alberta the Liberals' carbon-tax proposal, or, as Mr. Dion likes to call it, his "Green Shift" policy.
Since Mr. Harper and his Conservative government have been harshly critical of the idea, calling it a "crazy" concept and a program that would "screw" everybody across Canada, many Canadians might wonder why the prime minister would refuse the challenge. As confused and controversial as it is, climate change is the issue of the moment and the government's plans to combat it are, quite frankly, not so clear in the public mind as Mr. Dion's.
On the other hand, perhaps just as many Canadians might wonder what the point of such a debate would be, or even if a meaningful debate can take place in the current climate. Global warming may be the issue of the day, but it has become more emotional than rational, to the point that useful discussion of it has become almost impossible, particularly among politicians who are trampling each other to get the most political leverage out of it that they can.
Just look at the dodging and weaving that goes on. It was not so long ago that Mr. Harper did not believe, or at least gave no appearance of it, that global warming was the kind of problem to which governments could usefully respond.
He was probably right, at least in the sense that a problem implies a solution and there may well be no solution to this situation. If, as many climate scientists believe, global warming is part of a natural cycle of climate changes to which human activity contributes very little, then he was, back then, exactly right and all the rest is smoke and mirrors and politics.
It has hardly been a year since Mr. Dion rejected out of hand the idea of the carbon tax on which he is now staking the future of the Liberal party, not to mention his own rather shaky career. The reason for the about-face by both men is pretty well beyond doubt. In the absence of anything more serious to worry about, Canadians are concentrating on global warming as their worry bead of the day.
That the world is getting warmer seems clear, but why that is happening and what can usefully be done about it is more opaque. The politicization of the issue in Canada -- and just about everywhere else -- has made it positively cloudy.
What is clear is that Mr. Dion's best efforts, which, curiously, did not occur when he was environment minister in a Liberal government, or Mr. Harper's most heroic legislation, and there is none on the order paper yet, will not make much difference no matter what. Canada is a small country and contributes relatively little of the greenhouse gases that are the subject of concern -- about two per cent globally.
The politics of the issue are underlined by a report from the European group World Wide Fund for Nature, which this week condemned Canada as the second-greatest laggard in the war against climate change, after the United States. Predictably, Britain and Western Europe, which met their Kyoto Accord obligations entirely by circumstance rather than conscience or acts of economic sacrifice, rank on top.
This kind of hypocrisy surrounding the climate-change debate only confuses the issue and serves political agendas rather than public interests. It should not mean, however, that the talking should not publicly take place. Which leads one back to the question of why Mr. Harper will not debate this weekend with Mr. Dion about it, particularly on his home turf in Calgary, just south of the Alberta oilsands that are currently the most controversial component of Canada's small contribution to climate change.
At the end of the day, however, such a debate would probably contribute nothing. Concern about climate change has become an hysteria, not just in Canada but around the world -- in the United States, there is a growing movement to ban the import of oil from Alberta because so much energy is required to extract it from the oilsands, even though there exists no practical alternative to the fossil fuel that the U.S. so desperately needs.
But as long as environmental groups and the media can successfully whip that public hysteria, politicians will continue to pander to it. We might get to see that debate between Mr. Harper and Mr. Dion yet -- we almost certainly will get to see it before the next election, unless a real issue comes along to occupy people's minds before then. It could be fun, watching Canada's two most important political leaders trying to convince Canadians of things they were themselves unconvinced of so recently.
tom.oleson@freepress.mb.ca
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