Stephen Harper - Hypocrit without parallel

Isn't it ironic to see the PM riding in a boat beneath a headline reading Climate change deal tweaked? How many millions of the worlds poor will also be spending their lives in boats when the full impact of climate change hits? Of course, by then all that will remain of  Stephen Harper, politician, will be a portrait in the foyer of the House of Commons. Most of those living 20 years from now will not remember how the tradition of Canada as a leader was jettisoned by a PM who cared more for the fate of big oil than he did for his own citizens.

Mr. Harper is acting a lot like a former conservative PM, but Brian Mulroney was a Progressive conservative who only rolled the dice on his gamble with a trade deal, not the fate of an entire planet. Of course Mr. Harper is too smart to use such rash rhetoric, and who knows, perhaps he actually thinks he isn't gambling at all. But that would make his assertion of the gravity of climate change a little hollow, wouldn't it?

Harper makes the absurd statement More modest, achievable targets in the short term will get the planet on the right track. What? Where does that come from? Has he not heard the pleas of the scientists, the appeals of the politicians of the world, the statements of the all national institutes of science in developed countries and the attestations of the low lying island states that are destined to be submerged beneath the sea?

The government of Canada has decided that it is right, and Nicholas Sarkozy, Ban Ki Moon, Barak Obama, Angela Merkel, George Brown and so many other eminent world leaders are wrong. They refuse to acknowledge that Sir Nicholas Stern, the former World Bank executive, was correct when he wrote: refusing to address climate change will cost vastly more than actually acting on it.

Mr. Harper, the list of those attempting to educate you, in the most diplomatic manner possible, is growing longer and longer by the day, please, don't (reluctantly) go to Copenhagen and embarrass us even more. Canada doesn't really need any more disdain than it already has.