This week, we find "Dear Leader" prancing about Europe, further damaging Canada's reputation as a player on the world stage, and reinforcing the idea that Canada is being run from Washington these days.
But Harper this week is going on the offensive, trying to explain to leaders and others that, in his view, climate change policies or programs that protect endangered plant and wildlife species must be based on targets that are affordable, realistic and try to balance any economic costs against environmental gains. It is a pitch he and his environment minister, John Baird, have often made to a domestic audience.
"We have vowed to get past the empty rhetoric and to take real action to require Canadian industry to make real reductions in greenhouse gas emissions," Harper said in a speech in Bonn, Germany, at the United Nations Conference on Biodiversity, a meeting attended by delegates from 119 countries.
Meanwhile, at home, Harper has done exactly nothing to rein in some of Canada's worst emissions producing industries. Oh wait, he's putting money into "carbon sequestration" technology - more or less filling salt caverns with CO2...technology which barely exists today, and requires decades of active work to become meaningful. Meanwhile, his government is doing little or nothing to set meaningful standards against which we can measure progress, nor have they set any kind of targets that are even remotely meaningful.
We cannot assess whether something is meaningful, affordable or realistic when it is primarily the CO2 filled air being expelled from Harper's lungs as he speaks. I wasn't impressed much with either Chretien or Martin on their handling (fumbling) of taking steps with regards to Kyoto - Harper's worse on the subject because he speaks out of both sides of his face, and does even less.
Getting rid of Bernier might have been a good start, but replacing him with the ever present face of PMSH the Micromanager is NOT an improvement.
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