Environment summit’s blushing host

WORTH REPEATING

The government of Canada persists in the fiction that it is serious about meeting this country’s commitments to the Kyoto Accord. When the signatories of the environmental treaty gather in Montreal this week to begin advancing the Kyoto Accord to a new level, Environment Minister Stéphane Dion will preside over the assembly.

This may have environmentally concerned Canadians blushing because Canada is hardly ready to embark on Kyoto II. Canada, in fact, has yet to even begin to meet the requirements of the original Kyoto deal.

That treaty requires Canada to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 6 per cent below 1990 levels by the year 2012. The federal government, however, has failed to reduce emissions at all. Greenhouse gases in Canada have risen rather than dropped since the accord was written so that the Kyoto gap grows steadily wider. To make Dion’s position even more awkward, a report released last week says the commitments Canada has already made, unworkable though they may be, are far from adequate. The David Suzuki Foundation and the Pembina Institute argue that this country must cut greenhouse gases by 25 per cent of 1990 levels by 2020, and by 80 per cent by 2050 if the planet is to avoid the catastrophic climate change that global warming might bring.

That is going to be a pretty hard sell for a government daunted by even a 6 per cent reduction. It will be hard to sell to Canadian industry and to the Canadian public and it will be hard to sell to other nations in Montreal this week. Dion should not try to make such a sale. He should peddle a different idea. The perverse part of Kyoto is that those nations that have met or are close to meeting their commitments did so by happy coincidence: the pooling of quotas by the members of the European Union, where the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the de- industrialization of much of Eastern Europe meant that those nations had to make very little sacrifice under the terms of the accord. Of all the signatory nations, in fact, Canada faces the greatest hardships. Rather than embrace even more unrealistic commitments, what the Canadian government should ask the Montreal conference to do is to step back and take another look at Kyoto.

Other nations are already doing

that. Britain recently suggested that

Kyoto’s targets should be voluntary

rather than compulsory, because

that would perhaps persuade the

major holdouts to come under this

environmental umbrella. Aworld that is willing to work together toward cleaning itself up will accomplish more than one that feels coerced into doing it on an unfair and unequal basis. That is the argument that Canada should put in Montreal, not just because any other argument would be hypocritical coming from Ottawa, but because it presents a scenario that might actually work. This is an edited version of an editorial from the Winnipeg Free Press.