Goal of majority further from reach.

CHANTAL HÉBERT - October 14th, 2006.

If this keeps up, Stephen Harper can kiss his hopes for a majority in the next election goodbye and, with them, his dream of turning the Conservatives into Canada's natural governing party.

It would be bad enough for the minority government if today's EKOS poll only confirmed its failure to thrive in voting intentions. At the national level, the Conservative score of 36 per cent basically mirrors the results of the last election.

That's despite the fact that the Prime Minister has had the stage almost exclusively to himself all summer and that he has been pounding away at new policy announcements since the return of Parliament.

It's also despite the fact that the Liberals are still leaderless and that their campaign, according to the same poll, has failed to engage one in two voters and to produce a popular front-runner.

On that particular score, the poll results are at best a mixed bag. The Liberals may be having a four-way race to the top but for the Canadian public, their campaign is primarily a two-way contest between Bob Rae and Michael Ignatieff, with Gerard Kennedy and Stéphane Dion making up a somewhat distant second tier.

And while Rae emerges as the favourite for Liberal leader, it is Ignatieff whom poll respondents find more likely to bring the Liberals to victory in an election. Those contradictory findings could be a sign that when respondents of all political persuasions select their preferred choice, they sometimes do so on the basis of their own partisan interest, by looking for the leader least likely, at least in their minds, to do their own party damage, rather than with an eye to the best chances of the Liberals.

But if the Liberals, based on the tepid public response to their leadership campaign, are not holding the Conservatives back, then it follows that the government is failing to build efficiently on its gains from the last election through its own actions or lack of them.

Indeed, even with the same score as last January, the Conservatives are probably further from their goal of a majority than they were on the morning after the last election, and certainly more removed from it than at the peak of their honeymoon last spring.

In Quebec, the bottom is falling out from under Harper. His party has now dropped to third place, well behind the Bloc Québécois (44 per cent) and four points behind the Liberals (21 per cent).

With their support at 17 per cent, the Tories would be hard-pressed to get their 10 Quebec MPs re-elected, let alone win new seats. Their current standing is a full eight points below their score in the last election.

Quebec is also the only province where a solid majority feels that the government is not moving in the right direction, another sign that the Conservative audience in the province is slipping away quickly.

As bad as they are, these numbers cannot be news to the government. Tory strategists are no less addicted to focus groups and public opinion surveys than their predecessors in power.

In fact, it could well be that some Harper strategists have already given up on Quebec. How else to explain the spate of policy announcements and pronouncements of the past few weeks? If the government had wanted to run its prospects down in Quebec, it could hardly have achieved its purpose more quickly than by insisting on its plan to do away with the long-gun registry on the heels of a deadly shootout at Dawson College in Montreal, the abandonment this week of any pretence that climate change is a federal priority, the elimination of a variety of initiatives such as the court challenges and the literacy programs that have long stricken chords in Quebec and the recent musings about a defence of religions act.

Nor is there any sense that those measures — even as they echo negatively in Quebec — resonate loudly outside the core Conservative base elsewhere in Central Canada.

On the contrary, even as the minority government is bombing its own Quebec beachhead, it is also failing to make up for the ground it sacrifices in that province with gains in Ontario. And that, no matter how you look at it, makes Harper's current approach a self-defeating strategy.

`No benefit' in pollution plan: Critics

Studied leaked draft of Clean Air Act Tories to table document on Tuesday

PETER GORRIE - October 14th, 2006.

A leaked draft of federal legislation to combat smog and climate change suggests the new law would give Ottawa no new powers and could weaken some it already has, environment critics said yesterday.

The Clean Air Act is one of three pieces of legislation to be tabled on Tuesday by the Conservative government as a "Made in Canada" alternative to the previous Liberal plan to cut Canada's greenhouse gas emissions. The other laws will deal with energy efficiency and fuel consumption standards for cars and light trucks.

The proposed Clean Air Act is just a series of minor amendments to the seven-year-old Canadian Environmental Protection Act, the critics said.

"I was very taken aback. I expected some grand plan," said Beatrice Olivastri, executive director of Friends of the Earth, which received the leaked document about a month ago. "I sat on it hoping for indications of something better. I felt that surely they'd move it toward something more substantial."

But, she said, there have been no signs the legislation has been strengthened since the version her group received was written.

During the month, Friends of the Earth had the draft examined by environmental lawyers and legal academics.

"It's bizarre that a series of housekeeping amendments is being put forward as a Clean Air Act," Olivastri said.

"There's really no benefit at all to what they've done," said Stephen Hazell, executive-director of the Sierra Club of Canada.

The proposed law sets no targets or timetables for pollution cuts. In most cases, it simply gives Ottawa the option of imposing them.

The government would be obliged to set "objectives" for the two chemicals most likely to cause immediate health problems — ozone and fine particles. But the proposed law states those objectives would be voluntary.

The critics said Ottawa already has the powers it needs to regulate air pollution — a view backed last month by federal environment auditor Johanne Gelinas. The new act only creates unnecessary delays, they said.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper said this week no regulations would be enacted until after consultations — expected to take at least a year — with industry and the provinces. And there is no guarantee Parliament will approve the legislation before the next federal election brings everything to a halt.

As well, the new law could undermine the government's ability to impose regulations, the critics said.

The existing environmental protection act empowers Ottawa to regulate thousands of toxic substances. The new Clean Air Act would keep that provision, and also give the government similar powers over two additional lists of environmental hazards — air pollutants and greenhouse gases.

Air pollutants — such as ozone, nitrogen oxide and sulphur dioxide — create smog, which kills an estimated 5,800 people in Ontario each year.

Greenhouse gases — most notably carbon dioxide and methane — cause climate change by trapping the sun's heat in the atmosphere.

The critics said the existing law already covers every chemical on the new list of air pollutants: It designates them all as toxic substances.

As for the greenhouse gases, the previous Liberal government had a far better plan, they said. A year ago, it gave official notice that it would designate them as toxics, meaning that they, too, would be covered. That step could be taken quickly, since it would involve simply enacting regulations.

The Conservatives' approach could lead to legal challenges because, while Ottawa has clear authority to regulate toxic substances, the Constitution makes provinces responsible for air pollution.

Olivastri said the two other pieces of legislation to be tabled Tuesday could improve matters. But if they don't, the federal plan could make Canada a laughingstock next month at the United Nations' annual climate change conference, where countries are to discuss their progress on meeting their Kyoto Protocol commitments.

"This is a poor substitute for a Kyoto plan," she said.