Canada’s Ice Cream Castles in the Air

9 December 2010

It must be wonderful to live in the magical world of Canada’s environment file. In that enchanted land, a press release is the same as a law, and polluting for another 45 more years is the same thing as banning dirty coal.
You can tell Parliament and the media that you have published regulations to ban coal, but back in the normal world you’ve done nothing of the kind.
When asked in Parliament about his strategy for Cancun, the environment minister responded that Canada is the only country in the world with a real plan for banning coal-fired electricity generation and that he has 
already brought forward regulations to achieve that plan.
But let’s bring this back to reality.  There is no public plan and there are no regulations to ban coal. What the government has actually done is to announced that greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired electricity generation will be regulated starting in 2015, and draft regulations will be issued in April 2011.
On the same day, Canada’s environment commissioner released a report stating, ‘The health of Canadians and Canada’s natural environment, communities, and economy are vulnerable to the impacts of a changing climate, and the government is not ready to respond to them’.
Canada should return from its little vacation in the reality distortion zone and rebuild the trust and transparency that are expected at these negotiations