PM harms Canada's green cred at Bali summit

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Environment Minister John Baird are "definitely" damaging Canada's reputation at the UN climate conference in Bali, according to a climate-change policy analyst.

It has been widely reported that Harper and Baird will not agree to new emissions-reduction targets ahead of the 2012 expiration date of the current Kyoto targets unless so-called large polluters such as China and India sign a new agreement that governments are trying to hash out.

"It is a paradox for Canada to be saying that China and India have to be subject to targets when Canada is around 30 percent above 1990 levels," the Pembina Institute's Johanne Whitmore said by phone. "Our emissions target is six percent below 1990 levels. Right now there is nothing spectacular in what the government of Stephen Harper is doing. He has cut programs and reinstated them a year later under a different name."

This month, Ricken Patel of the New York–based Avaaz.org sent out a missive urging people to sign his letter to Harper. "Enough is enough," Patel's note states. "Prime Minister Harper's short-sighted, undemocratic and big oil-driven policy on climate change is damaging the world and destroying our image as a good country. We're supposed to be the nice guys, who try to do the right thing in the world."

In the foreword to the Canadian edition of his 2006 book Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning , U.K. author and Guardian columnist George Monbiot called Harper an "irresolute wimp" on climate change.

"The Canadian government under Harper now stands as one of the villains of the story of global climate change," Monbiot told the Straight on October 10, 2006. "As people wake up to just how bad its policies are, it will be seen increasingly as being in the same league as George Bush's government."

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