SAINT JOHN, N.B. - Liberal Leader Stephane Dion warned New Brunswickers on Thursday that the international community will punish economies that don't shift toward greener policies and cleaner fuels.
Dion, whose Green Shift carbon-tax plan has met with tepid support in Atlantic Canada, raised the spectre of foreign tariffs on Canadian energy exports if this country doesn't clean up its act.
"The world will not be nice for the free-riders of climate change," Dion told Liberal partisans at a morning pancake breakfast.
"The world will not be nice for the kind of leader we have today."
The message was part of a wider Dion effort to undermine Tory economic stewardship, which he says has left Canada in its worst position since the early 1990s -- when Progressive Conservative Brian Mulroney was prime minister.
He cited Canadian growth numbers that trail the rest of the G8 in 2008, and said productivity has fallen for nine consecutive months for the first time since 1990.
It took the Liberal governments of Jean Chretien and Paul Martin to fix the country's deficit problems after Mulroney, Dion told the crowd.
"We'll do the same now with Stephen Harper and his mess," said Dion, drawing a standing ovation from the 200-plus seated in the Lilly Lake Pavillion.
It was by far the best applause line of the morning. Dion's environmental message was met with a more subdued response.
Maritime Liberals have complained that the party's $15-billion carbon-tax proposal is a tough sell in an area where Irving Oil refineries, farming, fishing and forestry are all fuel-intensive economic drivers.
Dion pitched the economic case for a plan the Conservative government of Stephen Harper has panned as an economically risky "tax on everything."
Dion is fighting back by saying Harper is tossing gimmicks at voters in an effort to buy their votes with short-term panaceas like a proposed two-cent cut on federal diesel taxes.
He suggested sharply rising energy costs will quickly gobble up that tax break.
"In 10 years from now it's very likely we'll look at the cost of these fuels and we'll say, you know, in 2008 it was only that (much). It was the good old time."
Dion said he wants the Canada of that future to be using fuel more efficiently, and the country needs to start now.
And he said the policy will be good for both Irving Oil and its workers, because it will help the company shift to cleaner technologies while giving employees significant income tax breaks under the tax-shift plan.
Dion was enthusiastically introduced by Shawn Graham, the thirty-something Liberal premier of New Brunswick.
"I know what it's like to be underestimated," said Graham, who defeated Tory premier Bernard Lord two years ago. Lord is now a co-chair of Harper's election campaign.
But Graham refused to directly endorse The Green Shift at a news conference afterward with Dion.
The premier sidestepped a direct question, instead calling The Green Shift "a component" of the Liberal election platform.
"What's important to me as premier is how it dovetails into our provincial self-sufficiency agenda," he said.
Dion was to meet with the Saint John Board of Trade later in the morning before winging west to Vancouver, with a whistle stop en route in Thunder Bay, Ont.
