Prime Minister Harper had the guts to remove Canada from the Kyoto Accord almost the same way we got into it: with an order from his phone in the comfort of his office.
Never mind those big rooms down the hall full of elected representatives. Prime Minister Chrétien ratified the Kyoto Protocol at a brief ceremony in his office in 2002. He did not consult scientists, economists or anyone in his Cabinet, nor was David Anderson - Canada’s longest serving Environment Minister - consulted. Only Preston Manning and the Reform Party spoke out and were attacked as stooges for Big Oil.
Most Canadians remain blissfully unaware that there was never a vote on Kyoto in Parliament. I repeat, no vote.
They’re also blissfully unaware that oil companies have all agreed to support this asinine treaty. After all, oil execs already support exorbitant taxes on fuel which amount to about half the cost we pay at the pump. So why would they be worried about a few more percentage points going to the government? Do you remember any oil companies complaining when Gordon Campbell gave BC the first carbon tax in North America?
President Clinton had attempted a similar stunt in 1997 but, unlike those wily Canadians Chrétien and Campbell, he was overruled by his own Democratic allies in the Senate who united with Republicans to kill Kyoto unanimously. Unanimously! That’s the benefit of having checks and balances. In absence of those checks and balances, Harper reversed what Chrétien singlehandedly saddled us with.
Interestingly, Chrétien is a close friend of the man who started all this socialist-environmental madness, Maurice Strong, a Canadian who runs some sort of bureaucratic office through the United Nations that no one comprehends, and has tried for years to get everyone in developed countries to feel guilty for our standard of living despite being a multi-millionaire. Finally, he united the new breed of professional environmentalists with old-guard socialists left over after the collapse of Communism, and it was all downhill from there.
You see, spreading free enterprise and democracy can be so difficult these days what with all the accusations of racism from social relativists. So, Strong and Co. decided to just try to make everyone equal rather than doing anything to actually improve quality of life in the Third World, thereby compromising the leading free enterprise industrial economies.
Don’t believe me? Here are Strong’s words from the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro which laid the groundwork for the Kyoto Protocol of 1997: “What if a small group of world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the Earth comes from the actions of rich countries? … So, in order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
And so it was decided that Western economies would be undermined through cap-and-trade schemes and carbon taxation, and gullible Liberals like Chrétien and Campbell played along.
Never mind that all the CO2 trapped in fossil fuels came from the earth’s atmosphere which once held ten times more CO2. Never mind that any farmer can tell you that increasing CO2 levels boosts agricultural yields, and that scientists estimate 15 percent of the earth’s population exists today thanks to rising CO2 in the last century. You’re supposed to ignore all that.
You’re also supposed to ignore the news that Michael Mann’s much-touted “hockey-stick graph” - which multi-millionaire environmentalists like Al Gore claims shows that we’re living in the warmest period ever - was shown back in 2005 to produce its hockey-stick shape even if random data were used. Yeah… never mind the facts. Strong’s anti-Western legacy lives on here in Canada thanks to Chrétien’s anti-democratic actions nine years ago.
Billions of dollars in government subsidies have been wasted trying to comply with Kyoto. Harper stopped this madness dead in its tracks. A singularly important move to help Canada’s prosperity.
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