Environment Minister John Baird slammed back at former U.S. Vice President Al Gore's criticisms of the Conservatives' new environment plan.
"Look, we're going farther than any government in Canada. We're going much farther than Al Gore went," Baird told CTV's Question Period on Sunday.
"If we came forward with our environmental plan in the United States, they'd call it revolutionary because it's so tough."
Before a presentation of his Academy Award-winning film "An Inconvenient Truth," Gore told a Toronto audience on Saturday that the Tory plan was a sham and a fraud.
"I wish Al Gore had asked to be briefed on the plan. I wish he would have read the plan," Baird said.
A Gore spokesman told The Globe and Mail newspaper that Gore had read reviewed the plan before commenting.
Baird said the Tories aimed to go further in the next 13 years in fighting climate change than Europe has done in the last 10.
John Bennett of the lobby group Climate for Change told CTV.ca that statement is "a lie. There's no other way to answer that."
The European Union "15" is mostly on track to reach its Kyoto Protocol target, which is an eight per cent cut by 2012. The EU has set a subsequent goal of a 20 per cent cut in GHG emissions by 2020, using 1990 as a base -- and will raise that to 30 per cent if other nations join in.
The new Conservative target is a 20 per cent cut by 2020, but using 2006 as a baseline and not 1990.
As of 2004, Canada's emissions had risen 27 per cent above 1990 levels. Kyoto calls for Canada to cut its emissions by six per cent below 1990 levels by 2012.
Under the Conservative plan, that level of reduction won't be achieved until 2025.
"If Kyoto could strictly be met, our issue wasn't with Kyoto. Our issue was only with time," Baird said. "I can't turn back the hands of time. I can't take responsibility for the ten years under the Liberals when greenhouse gases went up."
The Reform/Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties -- which eventually merged to form the current Conservative Party -- all opposed both the signing and ratification of Kyoto. In a 2002 letter, then-Alliance leader Stephen Harper referred to the treaty as a "essentially a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations."
Layton, Dion
On Sunday, both Liberal Leader Stephane Dion and NDP Leader Jack Layton stuck up for Gore.
"Mr. Baird is embarrassing Canada around the world,'' Dion said at a Sikh festival in Toronto.
"The world expects Canada will do its share -- more than that, that Canada will be a leader and we are failing the world. We are failing Canadians.''
"Let me remind Mr. Baird and the Liberals before him that the U.S has done better in reducing their emissions than Canada has under the Liberals and the Conservatives,'' said Layton, who was also at the festival.
Between 1993 and 2003, U.S. emissions had risen 13 per cent, compared to 27 per cent in Canada. Experts say Canada's increase in carbon energy production, particularly from Alberta's oilsands, and increases in coal-fired electricity production partly helped drive emissions up.
If one adjusted for that, Canada's emission hike would have been about the same as the U.S.'s, Bennett said.
"I think Mr. Baird better stop throwing stones and start delivering action. Start by delivering the rewritten Clean Air Act to the democratic process of the House of Commons," Layton said.
The fate of the legislation, which had been the centrepiece of the Tories' environment policy last fall, remains in doubt.
The opposition parties declared it dead on arrival, and it went to a special committee for reworking.
However, Thursday's plan is being implemented within the existing legislative framework.
"Well obviously our preference would be to move forward with the clean air act. One of the challenges is that the Liberals put a plan, put an amendment in it that would basically allow industry an unlimited license to pollute," Baird said.
He hoped the government could work with the opposition parties and "salvage big chunks" of the bill.
With files from The Canadian Press
