Around this time last year, I examined the “greenness” of the 2005 federal budget. Despite some quibbles, most environmental groups agreed on one thing — that the feds had finally got it right in terms of climate change. It had taken over a decade of campaigning and consistent polls showing that the majority of Canadians wanted action on global warming until, finally, the tools were set in place to move forward.

This ’05 spending plan backed up Canada’s fundamental role at the November 2005 Kyoto talks in Montreal, where hundreds of nations — The Great (Still Sorta) White North included — committed to further reducing their carbon emissions in the name of maintaining human survival on this planet.

And so it was with deep disappointment recently — not six months after that groundbreaking conference in Montreal — that I read about Stephen Harper’s government pulling the plug on Canada’s Climate Change Program. According to the Sierra Club of Canada, all climate change programs announced in Action Plan 2000 have not been renewed and Natural Resources Canada has begun laying off staff. Included in the cuts is the Canadian Climate Impacts and Adaptation Research Network (C-CIARN), a research network established to improve knowledge of Canada’s vulnerabilities to climate change.

Harper, taking his slim minority win as a coast-to-coast endorsement for his entire platform, says he is simply making good on his campaign promise to deliver a “made in Canada” approach to climate change.

The problem? We already had a made-in-Canada solution. And he just abolished it.

From the time scientists first twigged to global warming in the early 1980s, and even more so from the time that the public, tipped off by 1988’s super heat waves, started to become aware of the problem, thousands of Canadians from all walks of life have worked to form Canada’s climate change action plan. It’s consisted of everyone from school kids planting carbon-dioxide-storing trees at Earth Day celebrations to members of advocacy groups like Clean Nova Scotia doing energy efficiency audits to elected members of both the government and the opposition working overtime on parliamentary committees.

Along the way, even some initially unlikely bedfellows, such as Canadian Auto Workers, the Communications Energy and Paperworkers Union, and the Canadian Labour Congress have come on board.

These groups — often with disparate backgrounds and values — strove together for over 10 years to create a climate change policy that all Canadians could live with. Considering that Canada has just experienced its warmest winter ever, and that our polar bears are starving for lack of sea ice for hunting, it’s a policy needed now more than ever.

Marc and Craig Kielburger, two of Canada’s highest-profile humanitarians, have shown that climate change is also an issue with deep human implications. In a recent Toronto Star column on the Kenyan drought, the brothers note that in order to help restore the regular precipitation that dry Kenyan farms — and bellies — so desperately need, we must challenge Prime Minister Stephen Harper to uphold Canada’s commitment to the Kyoto Protocol. Harper’s idea to create a new plan, they say, would “likely take years to plan and implement. Time is running out.”

Tellingly, Harper isn’t clamouring for sovereignty on any other issue, environmental or not. No talk of a “made in Canada” approach to conflict in the Middle East. No whisper of a “made in Canada” approach to the ozone layer. The World Trade Organization hasn’t received any angry calls from our man in Ottawa. And Harper even seems open to ending the undeniably “made in Canada” approach to medicare.

It seems that the PM is unable to deliver even a fraction of the courage he recently claimed to admire in Canada’s troops. Certainly more than just a fraction of same is needed to confront the real killers of our climate change plan — namely, energy and auto industry lobbies both north and south of the 49th.

In demolishing a truly Canadian, scientifically sound, socially inspiring and world-process-stewarding role in climate change, Harper is playing with fire — quite literally, with that massive ball of burning hydrogen some 150 million kilometres distant.

And the really bad news is that it’s all of us — not just he — who are going to get burned.