Good side of UN snub

Canada should take this opportunity to tell global body to stuff it on climate change

By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN, QMI Agency
Let’s look at the potential bright side of Canada’s humiliating loss of a temporary seat on the United Nations Security Council Tuesday to … wait for it … Portugal!

Could this international slap in the face to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservatives — voting an economic basket case like Portugal onto the Security Council instead of us — finally knock some sense into the Tories on climate change?
Face it, folks, the UN hates us. It really, really hates us.
You can’t support Israel and condemn Hamas with this crowd and expect to come up smelling like roses.
Thus punched in the gut by the — with few exceptions — nest of vipers known as the UN General Assembly, will the Conservatives now do the sensible thing and pull us out of the UN’s negotiations to draft a successor agreement to the Kyoto accord?
Negotiations which, if successful, will be a train wreck for Canada’s still fragile — as Finance Minister Jim Flaherty now acknowledges — recovery?
I’m hoping the answer is “yes.”
I’m betting the answer is “no.”
And that, inexplicably, Canada’s delegation, presumably led by Environment Minister Jim Prentice, will merrily head off to yet another round of UN global warming negotiations in Cancun next month, only to have the living crap kicked out of it by its domestic and foreign political and environmental enemies.
They’ll point to Canada’s first-ever failure to obtain a temporary seat on the Security Council as divine punishment for our original sin of failing to implement the economically devastating (to us) Kyoto accord, even though we’re only responsible for 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
In response, we’ll insist we’re doing our part, at which point we’ll be hit with a tsunami of orchestrated indignation.
If you thought things were bad at the UN’s climate talks in Copenhagen last December, where we “won” the “Colossal Fossil” award as the world’s worst global warming offender — even though that’s China — you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
This is the continuing fallout of Jean Chretien’s dumb display of hubris when he ratified the Kyoto accord without having any idea of how to implement it, the root cause of why we’re impossibly behind our Kyoto targets today and why implementing it now would be an economic disaster.
That’s why I want the old Harper back. The one who, when he was Canadian Alliance leader, correctly identified Kyoto (and its spawn) as a socialist, money-sucking scheme to transfer wealth from “rich” countries to “poor” ones — with emerging economic powerhouses like China and India, bizarrely defined as “poor.”
Now we have a new Harper, who, while admittedly much saner on this issue than the opposition parties, pays lip service to the Kyoto process, while failing to implement the Kyoto accord, because he knows it would devastate our economy.
On Tuesday, the Conservatives, worried Canadians will blame them for our humiliation at the UN, fingered Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff for not supporting Canada’s bid for a Security Council seat.
Problem is, the Conservatives engineered this gambit. Nobody forced them to do it.
Instead, since the UN has handed us a lemon, let’s make lemonade.
That’s why Harper should use this snub as an opportunity to say goodbye to the UN’s insane global negotiations on climate change.
lorrie.goldstein@sunmedia.ca