Once again, Natural Resource minister Joe Oliver is making some people (read: the Opposition) shake their heads in some combination of shame and disbelief thanks to something he said in response to a well-regarded voice on climate change. And once again, as a result, everyone is talking about Canada’s resource sector.
It started with a remark from former U.S. Vice-President (and documentary film/slide show director) Al Gore, who told the Globe and Mail’s Doug Saunders that, while he respected many things about Canada, he felt recent debates over oil sands and resources have hurt us. Specifically, he said, the “resource curse” from which Canada might suffer slightly, includes damage to “some extremely beautiful landscapes, not to mention the core issue of adding to the reckless spewing of pollution into the Earth’s atmosphere as if it’s an open sewer.”
During a teleconference from Paris Monday, Oliver said Gore’s comments were “over the top.” He told the Globe that Gore’s use of “words like, ‘open sewer’ are unfortunate and an attempt to create an impression which is false.”
On the Hill Monday afternoon, the New Democrats responded to the response.
“If it’s a choice between Al Gore and Joe Oliver on climate change, I think that we should be listening to Al Gore,” New Democrat leader Thomas Mulcair told reporters after question period. “He’s studied the issue well. It’s why you get those Nobel Prizes that they talk about.”
Mulcair then went a bit further.
“Joe Oliver is an embarrassment to all of us,” Mulcair said. “He is always out there attacking other people who are just saying the obvious with regard to Canada’s role.”
Likely, the Conservatives will look at the second part of that statement and chuckle, no doubt feeling somewhat the same about Mulcair.
I don’t profess to know the ins-and-outs of Oliver’s communications strategy of late, and I’d hesitate to call two instances any evidence of a pattern, but that this particular episode feels so much like the one last week, it ought to make us wonder a bit about why Oliver is picking fights with people like Gore or NASA scientist James Hansen.
Perhaps Oliver feels that he truly has the upper hand on the file. Or perhaps he feels he doesn’t need to, and instead, can simply work to lump criticisms from those voices most people would probably feel are fairly legitimate on this issue, in with the politicians in Ottawa. If Oliver takes people like Gore and Hansen into the realm of political rhetoric by, say, prompting the New Democrats to agree with them after he says something outrageous, then perhaps life gets a bit easier for him.
There is a central theme to a lot of the Conservative rhetoric against Mulcair and his caucus is that they’re willing to go off the the U.S. and tell the Americans Canada’s no good. When given the chance to point at a couple of Americans who are saying, essentially, just that very thing, why wouldn’t Oliver use it to make that point about the NDP again and again? Look how easy it is.
So, the NDP might have to be a bit careful. They have to respond in a way that doesn’t immediately reinforce the idea the Conservatives are trying to get across. Otherwise, they just feed the machine. It’s not easy.
“We’re the only country in the world to have ever withdrawn from Kyoto. We haven’t been enforcing basic rules of sustainable development like polluter pay so they can whinge and whine and moan all they want,” Mulcair continued on Monday. “That’s the reality and Al Gore is simply calling it the way everybody else who’s looked at the science of climate change is calling it.”
See, the Conservatives will say, there he goes again, agreeing with activists and trashing Canada.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca
Author: Colin Horgan
No comments:
Post a Comment