Resources minister "an embarrassment to all of us" – Mulcair.
by Samantha Bayard
OTTAWA, May, 6, 2013 (Straight Goods News) — The Conservatives' blunt-talking Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver squared off today against former US Vice-President Al Gore. Oliver, who has been an unabashed cheerleader for oil industry development, took issue with Gore's telling a Canadian newspaper that Canada's "resource curse" leads to "the reckless spewing of pollution into the Earth’s atmosphere as if it’s an open sewer."
Oliver told reporters Gore’s comments to an EU summit were "wildly exagerrated" and "inaccurate."
NDP Leader Tom Mulcair said that there isn't much choice between the Nobel Prize-winning Gore and Oliver, who has waffled on whether he believes climate change is a problem. "Look, Joe Oliver is an embarrassment to all of us. He is always out there attacking other people who are just saying the obvious with regard to Canada’s role. We’re the only country in the world to have ever withdrawn from Kyoto.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. 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," said Mulcair.
Tom Mulcair: "Joe Oliver is an embarrasement to all of us."
Oliver is now defending oil sands development against the European Union's proposed implementation of the Fuel Quality Directive (FQD), which would enable EU member countries to hit greenhouse gas targets by assigning value to fuel feedstocks and penalizing dirty fuel sources. Oliver says it unfairly discriminates against Alberta bitumen.
The NDP's Megan Leslie says the directive makes sense and is non-discriminatory. "If you look at what the Fuel Quality Directive does, it puts a label on different fuels according to the greenhouse gas intensity," she told reporters. "So oil sands product is there on the list. It doesn’t say Canada. It says oil sands."
"There’s even a provision in these regulations to say, 'If you as a country or if you as a producer don’t agree with the value we’ve assigned to this product, refute it. Bring us the science. Show us how we’re wrong.' So that is a perfectly reasonable way to set regulations around greenhouse gas emissions but we’re not reacting in a reasonable way."
Canada isn't reacting in a reasonable way on climate change – Megan Leslie.
About Samantha Bayard
Samantha Bayard is a young journalist living and working out of Ottawa. She has been a contributor to the Straight Goods News family of websites since 2009. She is an avid cyclist and lover of animals.
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