Home > Election-2008 > News > Comment

Comments from Équiterre, Sierra Club Canada and Greenpeace
October 7, 2008

Comments on the Conservative Party platform


“The environmental platform of the Conservatives is simply the same old rhetoric that they’ve been serving us over the last 2 years. The National roundtable on the environment and the economy and the C.D. Howe Institute both came to the conclusion that this approach would not yield the results that we need. Furthermore, 200 of Canada’s foremost economists have today publicly supported the establishment of a carbon-tax has both an economic development tool as well as an environmental measures and still, Stephen Harper’s conservative party continues to burry it’s head in the sand. This is very disturbing.”

Steven Guilbeault,
Équiterre


"Stephen Harper has been known as a climate change denier. Who thought he would now deny basic economic policy principles such as polluter-pay? The consensus is that there is no viable economy without a clean environment. Stephen Harper is isolating himself inside a very narrow worldview."

Hugo Séguin
Équiterre


“The Conservative Party has confirmed once and for all that it has no credible plan to protect Canada from the economic, social, and environmental hardship that unchecked climate change would bring.”

Jean Langlois
Sierra Club Canada


“The conservative platform has no good news on the environment and climate change. First they keep pulling the wool over our eyes. As the rest of the world uses 1990 as a benchmark year, the conservatives keep using 2006, when Canada’s Greenhouse gas emissions were already 24% above 1990 levels. They want to brush 16 years of inaction under the rug!”

“The conservative platform promises a cap and trade system. Such a system involves an absolute cap and yearly reduction of greenhouse gases, a concept that the conservatives reject in their Turning the Corner document. The conservative plan talks of reducing emmission intensity, an idea picked up by no other nation on earth. As the conservatives are not on the same playing field as the rest of the planet, announcing a North American Cap and Trade system is, once again, just smoke and mirrors”

Arthur Sandborn
Greenpeace