Fraud

As Stephen Harper prepares to pontificate to the world about the global warming crisis, Canada's own advisory panel exposes the ruse. People will remember that Harper and Baird have both argued that Canada can lead through example. It might be a good idea for someone to pass out the latest internal report to international delegations, prior to Harper's speech, to put the rhetoric in context. The really sad part, not one of the government's initiatives met with approval:

All nine programs in the plan, unveiled last month after Parliament passed a law that ordered the government to comply with the Kyoto Protocol, won't do the job, the National Roundtable on the Environment and Economy said yesterday.

The highly critical report came just three days before Prime Minister Stephen Harper is to defend his government's actions on climate change at a major UN meeting in New York.

The report accuses the Conservative government of using "systematic" exaggeration, "double accounting," "not accurately reflecting" emissions reductions, "important inconsistency" and "overestimated" reductions to produce false conclusions about the effectiveness of its plan.

It concludes that of the nine federal climate-change programs it studied, the government had exaggerated the benefits of three and failed to produce sufficient information to support the other six.

Systematic "exaggeration" speaks to deliberate fraud, and the panel went so far as to use the word "misleading", which translates into lying. Conservatives have countered that the report is also supportive of their Kyoto perspective, as well as weak arguments on time and scope of the conclusions. A great way to seperate the conflicting signals, is merely to look at when the report was released. The old Friday afternoon news dump, is a classic damage control technique, hoping no one notices heading into a slower, weekend newscycle. The timing of the release tells us all we need to, in distinguishing the spin from the substance.

Can't wait for the "leading by example" tone of Harper's speech, because this latest report is another critical item to put in the ever-growing negative dossier. Economists, environmentalists, government agencies, all in agreement, the Conservatives are pure bluster. Frankly, Harper should be blushing through his entire speech, as he tries to snow the world once again.