The Red-Green Show

Admittedly, I was pretty excited when I heard that former environment minister Stéphane Dion unexpectedly won the Liberal leadership. Not only that his environmental outlook seems a literal breath of fresh air, but by voting with their hearts instead of (maybe) their heads, Liberal delegates have helped transcend the image of the Party's all-things-to-all-people populism with some real conviction.

But for the Grits to slam dunk the Conservatives on the environment, which is certainly there for the slam dunking and definitely needed to win back even a minority government, they're going to have to get the Kyoto monkey off their collective backs. Everyone knows the protocol has failed, and to be fair, the Conservatives have been the only ones to admit it. Their mistake was to have no alternative to appease an ever-greener Canadian public. And having a useless environment minister.

Dion would do well to admit his complicity in Kyoto's slow death and offer Canadians what Harper was supposed to: a 'Made-in-Canada' solution that addressed the reasons why it died and offered a way forward. That would soften the blow from the inevitable onslaught of Conservative criticism that Dion presided over a massive increase in carbon emissions in his time as environment minister, even more than climate change bogeyman America. Harper's government has maintained a wishy-washy pledge to adhere to some of Kyoto's far-off targets, so in denouncing it, Dion could outflank the conservatives and expose their lack of leadership on an increasingly important issue. While Harper is rearranging deck chairs on the proverbial sinking ship, for the moment, Dion is standing on deck waiting to drown.

The Liberals have invested a lot of political capital in Kyoto and if Dion is the man of conviction he was elected to be, he shouldn't be afraid to admit that it's not working - that's the easy part. Pushing for a new international carbon-cutting regime, finally getting America onboard and changing the Canadian marketplace to foster sustainable growth will be much harder.