Federal-provincial relations make an appearance in the ever-expanding climate debate
Continuing the Guardian’s spate of spirited punditry on the subject of Ottawa’s rotten record in the run-up to the Copenhagen global warming summit, Colin Horgan, a Vancouver-based freelance writer, takes a stab at explaining Canadian regional politics to the paper’s leftish UK and international readership. Actually, Horgan doesn’t do a bad job. You have to admire a guy who tries to interest foreign readers in the equalization system. His conclusion: Stephen Harper can’t afford tough greenhouse gas emissions targets because he needs his MPs from Albertan oil country. “That doesn’t mean that a new Liberal government would shut down the oil sands oil extraction on their first day in office,” Horgan adds, “far from it.”