Bitter green: If I were the environment, I’d be ticked off at Stephen Harper. Not for abusing me, for using me. What I mean is: It is now standard for neo-conservative governments to gesture in the direction of the environment while maintaining an underlying contempt.

They still think global warming is junk science, or “disputed.” A large disinformation industry, funded by Big Oil, churns out propaganda on this, just as it denied a cancer-tobacco link for years. But they also know, in the Canadian political context, that you have to look a bit green and pwogwessive.

So the environmental tokens don’t stand alone; they are loss leaders in an effort to show these governments aren’t as right wing or hard-hearted as voters suspect they are.

I cite the case of Ontario’s former Mike Harris government. In its first 18 months, it savaged environmental protections. Rather than encouraging alternates to cars, it shortchanged public transit and built new highways (four-laning the road to Mike’s home in North Bay, thus cutting 10 minutes off my trip to the cottage and halving business in towns along the way).

Then, when an election neared, it introduced a Drive Clean program, with cute cartoon ads. This put the onus on individual drivers rather than fleets or industry. It acted as a regressive tax on less wealthy drivers with older cars. They had to line up (I was rear-ended at an inspection, but I’m not bitter) and pay fees plus repairs. Deaths from smog still increased. But those cuddly ads gave the impression the Tories cared.

The pressure in this area is only going to rise, chiefly because people can now see direct effects of global warming. Look at the hurricane seasons and Katrina. Look at the poor polar bears. It’s getting easier to deny evolution (which some of the same folks do) than to deny global warming.

What’s impressive about Stephen Harper is how hard he still finds making the gesture. He promo’d this week’s environmental unveiling heavily, but it mainly announced future announcements, confused global warming with air pollution, and said nothing would happen for a year, and then not much.

I’ve read about Stephen Harper being pragmatic and wanting to win elections, but he still looks ideologically rigid to me. He didn’t attend the AIDS conference this summer, which looked uncaring, then sent his Health Minister, who was supposed to announce some funding, but they cancelled that, too. He reminds me of Robert Redford in The Candidate, playing a liberal who keeps blurting out what he really thinks. In an odd way, I think he and Michael Ignatieff mirror each other. Both take their own ideas way too seriously.

Take your responsibility and: I wish leaders such as Stephen Harper, George Bush and Tony Blair, who often say they “accept responsibility,” would get clear on what they are responsible for. They are responsible for the results of their actions, not whatever good intentions they have (or mouth) when they embark. Their job is to anticipate and ensure those results. At the least, they must not make a situation worse than it was before they acted. This is not a point in abstract theory.

The situation in Iraq is far worse now than it was before the invasion. The danger of future terror attacks has increased because of it; the United States’ own military and intelligence say so. And the suffering of Iraqis, amazingly, has also risen. The death rate is four times what it was under Saddam Hussein, says this week’s Lancet study; most Iraqis just want the foreigners to leave. That is what Tony Blair and George Bush are responsible for.

It seems to me this kind of sage awareness underlies the scepticism that many Canadians feel about our Afghan mission. They are worried about the results, not the motives. So when Lewis MacKenzie wrote in The Globe and Mail this week that the polls should ask, “Do you support letting the Taliban return to power” and “Do you support beheading teachers,” he misses the point. People are not questioning goals; they are evaluating the chances of getting there. They see not just the bodies arriving, but the news, and it looks too much like Iraq. In its way, it is getting as unmistakable as global warming.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.