A former top adviser to Jean Chrétien admitted yesterday the government was not prepared to implement Kyoto at the time it was ratified in 2002. Eddie Goldenberg said the Chrétien government felt signing and ratifying the international treaty was simply a first step in swaying public opinion in favour of changes aimed at addressing climate-change.

"I believe that the signing of the Kyoto accord in the face of vigorous opposition served to galvanize public opinion to bring it to where it is today in Canada," said Goldenberg, who served as Chrétien's chief of staff in 2003. "In the long run, that will be far more important than whether we can meet all the short term deadlines in the accord."

In a speech to the Canadian Club in London, Ontario, Goldenberg said Canadians were not ready at the time for the political changes necessary to meet the targets laid out by the protocol, supporting the agreement’s principles only "in the abstract."

"Nor was the government itself even ready at the time with what had to be done," he said. "The Kyoto targets were extremely ambitious and it was very possible that short term deadlines would, at the end of the day, have to be extended."

Goldenberg’s comments come as the federal government is struggling to develop and implement its own "made-in-Canada" approach to emission reductions, though one oil industry official may have revealed part of that new plan yesterday.

According to The Globe and Mail, Suncor Energy spokesman John Rogers said the Harper government is planning to force energy companies to reduce carbon emissions by 2% for every barrel of oil they produce. Otherwise, the companies would face a 25 cent per barrel penalty, Rogers claimed to have been told by federal officials.

"I guess it was pretty clear that the Liberals had no intention of meeting the targets when they signed Kyoto because they didn't do anything to get us there," NDP leader Jack Layton told reporters after Question Period on Thursday.

"So I guess what Mr. Goldenberg is intending to suggest is that all they wanted to implement as Liberals were symbols. They didn't really actually want to do anything about the crisis."

"[W]e always knew that the Liberals had no plan, they took no action and had little intention of doing so," environment minister John Baird said, pointing to the Conservative record. "We're excited about the initiatives that we're taking… on clean transportation, clean energy… the auto sector."

David McGuinty, the Liberal environment critic, expressed surprise at Goldenberg's statements, telling the Globe that he had personally helped design Ottawa's plans for meeting the Kyoto targets. He suggested Goldenberg should clarify his motives, given his current position as a lobbyist for energy sector firms such as TransCanada Pipelines.

Canada signed the Kyoto Protocol in 1998 and ratified it in 2002, thus committing to achieving a 6% reduction in 1990-level greenhouse gas emissions between 2008 and 2012. But emissions continued to rise, as they had since 1990. By 2004, according to government submissions to the UN, Canada's emissions were 27% above 1990 levels and 35% above the Kyoto target.

With files from Canadian Press

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