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OTTAWA — Canada should treat the Copenhagen climate change conference as an opportunity to show leadership, not like it’s a “trip to the dentist,” Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff said Friday.
He said the Liberals are willing to work with Prime Minister Stephen Harper to build a national climate change plan based on a cap-and-trade system that applies to all industries. But he argued Canada shouldn’t just echo the American position on greenhouse-gas cuts.
“We’re allowing the environmental policy — which is basically the economic and energy policy — of a great sovereign nation called Canada to be dictated in Washington,” he told Sun Media.
Liberal environment critic David McGuinty, who returned from Copenhagen Friday, said delegates to the conference “were surprised that Canada seems to have disappeared from the forefront” of efforts to fight climate change.
Canada was given the “Fossil of the Year” award by environmental groups at the conference. NDP environment critic Linda Duncan, in the Danish capital, said “I think it’s deserving” that Canada was singled out for the dubious distinction. The Harper government, she said, is “stalwartly refusing to budge.”
Green party Leader Elizabeth May, also in Copenhagen, said Canada’s negotiators have “injected uncertainty and dispute over and over and over again” in climate change talks.
— Files from Althia Raj
christina.spencer@sunmedia.ca