PE.com - Environment Blog

The Great White North may be not being so great

Guy Aube is among hundreds of environmental activists protesting Canada's stand at the climate change talks being held in Bali during a rally in Montreal, Dec. 7. His sign, with the melting globe, translates to say "I'm hot." (Peter McCabe/CP)

As the international talks on climate change continue in Bali -- Japan and Canada, my home country, are emerging as the most uncooperative. Or so say some.

It's apparently so bad that the governments of two powerful Canadian provinces, Ontario and Quebec, are trying to dissociate themselves from Prime Minister Harper's government. Kind of sounds like California and the Bush administration when it comes to this same issue.

If you recall in a blog item in June, Quebec became Canada's first province to impose a carbon tax to raise funds to fight global warming. This major event happened when Paris Hilton was in jail, so it didn't garner much attention. The tax on oil companies and others was to start this fall and raise about $200 million a year to pay for energy-saving initiatives such as improvements to public transit.

All this as Canada also announced from Bali that it is contributing $7.5 million to a global fund designed to help poor countries deal with climate change. It is the second-largest donation to the Global Environment Facility's climate-change fund. Developing countries are expected to face a disproportionately high number of problems from global warming.