The Tar Sands are Canada's biggest single site emitters of greenhouse gasses causing global warming.
Harper's "can't do" attitude seems to come from wanting to protect those big oil corporations and nothing to do with 'is it possible' to reduce our emissions.
Harper seems unwilling to find solutions
http://www.thestar.com/article/182293
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Harper's "can't do" attitude seems to come from wanting to protect those big oil corporations and nothing to do with 'is it possible' to reduce our emissions.
Harper seems unwilling to find solutions
http://www.thestar.com/article/182293
Harper likes to imply that actually meeting Kyoto targets would require unbearable sacrifices by Canadians.
He recently suggested we'd have to live in unheated homes all winter.
He seems to be trying to keep the focus away from reasonable and promising solutions, like clamping down on large industrial emitters, an approach called for in the opposition bill rejected by the Conservatives.
Above all, Harper seems keen to avoid clamping down on the oil sands.
Indeed, Harper's weak embrace of the environmental cause is perhaps best revealed by his refusal to end a special federal subsidy enjoyed by oil sands developers, a constituency that Harper has long been close to.
Under the Accelerated Capital Cost Allowance, oil-sands developers are allowed to deduct 100 per cent of their capital costs immediately – a tax perk that far exceeds the generosity of the 25 per cent deduction available to companies investing in conventional oil projects.
The allowance, introduced in 1996, was justified as a way to stimulate investment in the oil sands at a time when the potential of the resource hadn't yet been proven, and low world oil prices made development costs seem prohibitive.
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No matter how hopeless the situation in Afghanistan, Harper vows that Canada will be there, as a “country that leads, not that just follows.”
Yet in the battle against climate change – a far more important battle, by any reasonable measure – Canada, under the Conservatives, doesn’t lead or follow. It doesn’t even bother to show up.