Tories Axe Website In Kyoto Assault: Liberals

"And the website is just one example of it," said Holland, who has issued a joint protest with Liberal environment critic John Godfrey. "I think if you listen to their language on environmental issues, they'll talk about pollution, or smog, but they won't talk about greenhouse gases or climate change at all." The pair also say the Conservatives have been expunging previous government news releases and other climate change information from federal websites. Godfrey said the Tories are trying to eliminate as many references as possible on government websites to the Kyoto climate change protocol. "Their approach is downplay, downplay, deny, minimize and manufacture confusion" on this issue, he told the Star's Les Whittington. As of yesterday, the federal http://www.climatechange.gc.ca site was "currently unavailable" although it did point to a pair of Environment Canada and Natural Resources Canada links, where information on climate change is available. Officials in Environment Minister Rona Ambrose's office defended the government's action on global warming. "Our new government is committed to cleaning up Canada's air, land and water by implementing a made-in-Canada plan," Ambrose spokesperson Ryan Sparrow said in an email. "In addition to the $2 billion in our budget for our made-in-Canada plan, our government has already invested $1.3 billion in public transit." Sparrow says his government has nothing to be ashamed of, given the Liberals' environmental record. "While the Liberals talked about the environment for 13 years and did nothing, our Conservative government is already acting to reduce pollutants that are harmful to Canada's environment and the health of Canadians." But another media officer in the department expressed surprise the site was down. "Unfortunately I don't know really what's happened. ... I thought it was still functional," William Cook said yesterday. The link on the now unavailable climate change site to Environment Canada's Green Lane site offers no scientific information under its main climate-change heading. http://tinyurl.com/ekpdl [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on August 8, 2006]

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