An Open Letter To Rona Ambrose

I realize that you don't like speaking or answering questions in front of the cameras. That is evidenced by your propensity for skipping out the back door during press conferences and your general recalcitrant attitude to both the press and those who seek answers from you on the floor of the House of Commons. Hopefully you are just a little camera-shy, though, and will take the time to answer some questions from a concerned Canadian. 1. Why do you need a whole new act instead of working through CEPA? Professional after professional and expert after expert has said that CEPA contains the tools you need to clean up both air quality and meet our Kyoto goals. A new act will take 5 years to put into place. Since our Kyoto goals are to be met by 2012, you will be leaving yourself, or more likely the Environment Minister from another party, only 1 year to reach those goals. How can you criticize the Liberals for their inaction when all we know of your plan looks to be another half-decade of stalling tactics? 2. About your plan, or approach, or whatever you are calling it today. What is it? I really want to know. I also want to know how it differs from the plan you said you had when you were in opposition and the plan you said you had during the last election. Mostly I want to know how much it is going to cut GHG emissions by though, and by what date we will meet our original Kyoto goals. 3. Why do you keep trying to shift the conversation away from Kyoto and into clean air? My suspicion, having watched George Bush in action, is that you are going to concentrate on particulates as a way of avoiding taking substantive action on greenhouse gas emissions. I realize that your government does not like being compared to the corrupt and incompetent Bush regime, but I also realize that your party has spent a lot of time listening to their backroom boys tell you how to campaign and how to run a government. It wasn't that long ago that the man who taught the Republicans how to lie about global warming was up here giving your political brethren lessons, after all. The advice he gave the Republicans was to do what you appear to be doing right now...to muddy the waters and hope nobody notices. 4. Why is it that you have talked to oil and gas industry and the auto industry, but have not talked to Canadians? Not to put too fine a point on it, but most of us voters aren't really happy when our politicians engage in closed door meetings with executives and refuse to tell us exactly what was said. It carries the stench of corruption and elitism, something your government said it was going to change. I realize that you ran some focus groups earlier in the year, but focus groups are not the same as the general public. Advertising executives know that and so should you. It was rather comical that the party that doesn't believe in polls and had been saying they had a plan for two years needed to run focus groups before they could tell anybody what that plan was. Unfortunately, what Canada's environment does not need is more fodder for political humour. 5. When will regulation come in? 2010 is too late. It is, in fact, no better than what the Liberals gave us. They said that they'd use voluntary measures until 2010, then bring in regulation if necessary. You are doing the same. You seem to be developing a habit of criticizing Liberal inaction while the only action you take is to adopt a few Liberal initiatives as your own. You did it with your five percent bio-fuel promise and you are doing it with regulation. 6. Unfortunately, you don't steal enough Liberal initiatives. My understanding is that you've screwed up carbon sequestration initiatives for farmers even worse then the Liberals did and that it is unlikely that a workable credit program will be available to farmers anytime soon. Of course that is only my understanding because there is no information available. You seem unwilling to share your plans with those directly affected by those plans. Why is that? This is of particular concern to my friends and relatives in rural Saskatchewan and rural Manitoba who see carbon sequestration both as a way they can contribute to the environment and a possible way to add value to their farm businesses. Surely you understand the importance of this type of information to those who make a living farming. You cancelled several other Liberal programs that were beginning to have a positive effect. I realize that the Liberals didn't accomplish much, but they did have some things that were working. You axed those around the same time you were hassling a climate scientist for writing a work of fiction in his spare time. You asked for bi-partisan cooperation when you met with the Environment Committee, but all indications are that your own actions on the environment have been based on nothing more than petty, ill-considered partisanship of the worst kind. So the question is, since you have cancelled so many environment programs, what do you intend to replace them with and, more specifically, what are you going to do about carbon sequestration in the agricultural industry? 7. You have stated categorically that Canada will no longer contribute aid in the form of green technologies or money for green development in the developing world. You, more than a little dishonestly, quoted from a report on the World Bank when attempting to justify this bizarre and contradictory stance. The report had not been written about Kyoto in general or the green development plan within Kyoto specifically, but about the greater problem of tracking money in the developing world. Providing green technology to the developing world is an integral part of meeting Canada's Kyoto goals. We get credit for it and real gains can be made in reducing GHG emissions. More than that, green energy technologies are often much more suitable in developing nations because they do not require the same ongoing supply and maintenance costs as diesel and gasoline generators do, for instance. The same can be said of farming practices designed to reduce GHGs or sequester carbon because those same practices reduce erosion and desertification. All of that while building the potential for tade and export in green technologies and you just tossed it out the window. I realize that your friends at Exxon, Cargill, General Motors, and Monsanto prefer that we provide environmentally harmful technologies to the developing world in the name of corporate profits, but citing corrupt governments in the developing world as an excuse for the corrupting influence corporations have on governments in the developed world is hardly an improvement. Will you rethink your misbegotten approach in this matter? 8. Your party has been against Kyoto since the very beginning. First you tried to deny the science, then you tried to deny the process of Kyoto, and now you are using the Liberals' poor performance as an excuse for what appears to be your own reluctance to act. Your connections to the oil industry are well known, as is that industry's propensity for funding purveyors of junk science that seek to misinform and confuse the debate on what to do about global warming. Tim Ball, scientific contrarian and global warming denier, is rumoured to be recruiting for your party in British Colombia. The University of Calgary, which Stephen Harper is so closely connected to, has been laundering money from the oil patch to fund The Friends of Science, a group that is neither a friend of science, nor truthful in its many shenanigans. You say, Ms. Ambrose, that we cannot meet the Kyoto goals and must have new targets. Many in your party, both those that sit in the House and those that spin your partisan message in the press and on the internet, have said that Kyoto is everything from a communist wealth transfer scheme, to a plot by Maurice Strong to take over the world, to a Liberal attempt to reinstate the National Energy Program. While I find these conspiracy theories from the climate change deniers entertaining, I find your position confusing. You have shown little or no dedication either to the protocol or to the science that shows global warming to be an increasingly urgent issue that will affect future generations. At the same time, you have aligned yourself with the charlatans and frauds who deny global warming, the Kyoto Protocol, and the scientific method. All that and yet you now claim to support Kyoto, but not the rather pedestrian goals that have been set for Canada? Do you believe in climate change? Do you believe that climate change is anthropogenic? Do you understand the science behind climate change theory and are you willing to listen to expert opinion from scientists instead of meeting with corporate hacks who have a vested interest in seeing you do nothing? Do you understand Kyoto? Do you believe in the Kyoto Protocol? Are you capable of comprehending that once we ratified Kyoto, it became international law? You have given no real answers to those question, Ms. Ambrose, and it is high time you did. So, I think that's about it for now. Eight questions, give or take. I have many more, of course, but these are the ones that I am most curious about. I realize that you prefer to meet with men in suits who can provide corporate boardrooms and expensive snacks, but I'd like to invite you to come and answer these questions at my house, in person. I make the offer partly because I think that you've lost touch with average Canadians, as witnessed by your claim that smog is a higher priority for Canadians than climate change, but also because I want to see if you can look me in the eye and refuse to answer my questions the way you do with your colleagues in Parliament. At any rate, let me know when you can swing by. I'll have some cold beer waiting, and maybe some kielbasa and crackers, and we can have a civilized chat where you answer the questions asked and provide reasons for those answers instead of empty rhetoric and evasions. You can bring whoever you want with you, and perhaps I'll invite a couple of friends. It'll be like a party. If you are unwilling to meet with a real Canadian in person, perhaps because of my lack of corporate influence, I will be more than happy to receive your full answers via e-mail or regular mail. Sincerely, Blair Korchinski. [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on October 11, 2006]