National Affairs
One thing to be stupid, another to misinform
Claire Hoy

Obviously, Abraham Lincoln didn't know current Liberal Senator Dennis Dawson. But he sure knew his type. Which is why Lincoln described one prominent hypocrite "the man who murdered both his parents, and then when sentence was about to be pronounced pleaded for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan."

Which brings us, of course, to Dawson's recent claim that Environment Minister John Baird's predictions about the economic cost of meeting the Kyoto emission-reduction targets before 2012, are yet another example of Tory scare tactics. "The sky is falling - we've seen this before..." says Dawson. "Every time we talk about changes that protect the environment we have people telling us they will destroy the economy."

This would be a representative of the same Liberal Party which, during all those years in government, did absolutely nothing - nada - to attempt to meet the Kyoto targets which they, you'll recall, signed onto in the first place.

In fact, to say the Liberals did nothing while in office is to understate the case, since under their watch, emissions did not remain static but instead rose at a dramatically faster rate than in, say, the United States, a country which did not buy into the false hopes and junk science behind Kyoto and much of the current environmental lobby.

All Baird did, in fact, was to release the same sort of economic statistics which those same Liberals had access to themselves - but didn't make public.

For a Liberal, any Liberal, to suggest that it is "scaremongering" to simply release the results of a study by five independent economists, is almost beyond belief, even for a party which really believes it is entitled to govern Canada for all time.

You want scaremongering?

How about a quote from Liberal Leader(less) Stéphane Dion, in a joint statement with Green Party leader Elizabeth May announcing they were joining, er, forces, when he claimed that "the planet has reached its limit.

The human-caused damage to our natural environment is devastating."

Oh please. Dion knows - or should know, having been one of various Liberal environmental ministers who did nothing about Kyoto beyond talking about it - that the earth in many ways is better than it's ever been.

In a weekend exchange of e-mails between May and National Post columnist Terence Corcoran on the 37th Earth Day, May actually agreed with Corcoran's point that "since the first Earth Day, in 1970, our environment - in Canada and around most of the world - has improved dramatically: less smog, less pollution, less risk, healthier people."

That doesn't mean there isn't more to do. (And May would certainly go much further than Corcoran would.)

But to paint a doomsday picture of environmental devastation - as Dion and his ilk love to do - is the worst kind of partisan, public fearmongering.

Why the worst kind? Because it's not done simply out of ignorance. It's being done deliberately to push a perceived partisan - or in the case of many environmentalists, economic - advantage.

It's one thing to be stupid. It's quite another to deliberately misinform. Baird's argument is that to reduce Canada's greenhouse emissions by 36 percent over the next five years - as a combined opposition motion demands - would mean the loss of 275,000 existing jobs, a drop of more than four per cent in our overall economy (which means a serious recession) and numerous price hikes, such as a 50 per cent increase in home-heating prices.

That's what Senator Dawson and the Liberals - along with most environmental activists and their friends in the media -are dismissing out of hand. Yet, in 2000, when the Liberals were still in government, their own Analysis and Modelling Group, which formed part of a federal-provincial task force to implement the climate accord - concluded that if the Liberals began trying to reach the Kyoto targets in 2001 it would cause "sustained, long-term negative economic impacts."

To start now, six years later, and implement the targets by 2012, as the opposition is demanding, would obviously make the economic costs even more devastating.

Yet, the Liberals' own report in 2000 on the subject said implementing Kyoto back then - and over a much longer time period - would reduce the disposal income of the typical Canadian family by $4,400, and our overall economy would shrink by - wait for it - four per cent, the exact same number which Baird predicts and which the Liberals are now using to accuse him of fearmongering.

One more thing. Until the Kyoto backers provide credible evidence to support their spurious claim that not meeting Kyoto would cost more than meeting it, let's just put that fairy tale to bed, shall we?