Torys Serve Up Vaporware

Stephen Harper was supposed to announce his plan for regulating GWG emissions in the last week of March. Now, three weeks later, a "secret plan" lands up with every newspaper in the country promising wonderful things: participation in Kyoto's CDM, declines in emissions by 2012.

But of course the Tories won't take ownership of the plan:

Eric Richer, a spokesman for Environment Minister John Baird, said the plan "sounded like action and we promised action."

But Richer said he had not seen the document and could not comment on it.

Its apparently just supposed to float around out there as an expression of the Torys' wonderful intentions.

The Nerds have a word for this kind of thing--Vaporware:

Vaporware is software or hardware product which is announced by a developer well in advance of release, but which then fails to emerge, either with or without a protracted development cycle.

Because it looks very much like C-30 (the Clean Air Act) will die without coming to a vote, and it would not surprise me if the "release date" on these vaunted regulations doesn't get pushed back and pushed back and pushed even further back...

Because the Tories, despite their Winter offensive on the Environment, know that their previous announcements were just appetizers before the main course, which centers around C-30 and these emissions regulations. And it is the one issue that they are afraid to fall over, and yet their political pre-commitments to the oil-patch and other interest groups mean it is an issue that they can't afford to act meaningfully upon. So I suspect they will try and sneak away in the night, as it were--choose discretion as the better part of valor.

The good news is that, despite what you might have read, Dion's environmentalism is still a powerful political cudgel to beat the Tories with. The bad news is that, as a result, we will most likely get another summer of inaction.





Claims He Wants "Action"