Angry in the Great White North

The Globe and Mail has the leak:

The Auditor-General's Office is poised to release a scathing assessment of Liberal spending programs linked to the Kyoto climate accord. The report is expected to land Sept. 28, within days of the announcement of the Conservative government's environmental plan.

"The content will be extremely critical of how money and programs were handled," said a non-partisan source familiar with some of the report's findings.

The source said the audit's criticisms include actions at Environment Canada when it was led by former minister Stephane Dion. Mr. Dion is currently campaigning for the leadership of the Liberal Party and has made environmental policy a central part of his platform. He was environment minister from July of 2004 until the government's defeat Jan. 23, 2006.

So the ideas were bad, and the money was wasted.

Ouch!

An internal examination of Liberal climate-change spending by then-prime-minister Paul Martin's advisers, which was obtained and reported on by The Globe in 2005, warned that the government's focus on encouraging voluntary action through advertising and brochures had produced poor and sometimes "terribly disappointing" results.

Well, when you count all the trees chopped down to make those brochures, it's even worse.

What about Stephane Dion? To be fair, he won't say anything until the report is published:

Mr. Dion's spokesman, Andre Lamarre, said yesterday that Mr. Dion's April, 2005, Project Green addressed problems with earlier Liberal policy. He said it would be difficult to comment on the audit before it is released.

I can wait.

While I'm waiting, the environmentalists are worried:

John Bennett, an environmentalist with the Climate Action Network, was in Nova Scotia yesterday as part of a cross-country consultation project to hear from Canadians on climate change.

He said he's worried the Conservatives will use the report as an excuse to scrap climate programs.

Well, duh! If the programs don't work and are a waste of money, they ought to be scrapped.

Actually, Bennett seems to think the solution is to spend more money:

"We're concerned that action on climate will be collateral damage as the government uses the Auditor-General's report to beat up on the Liberals for partisan purposes," he said. "Fundamentally, everything the Liberals did was a reasonably good idea. The problem with them, in our point of view, was they weren't big enough and weren't supported by regulation so they could actually achieve things rapidly."

Right. A modest set of goals could not be met, so the solution is to set even more ambitious goals, and demand that we achieve those new goals sooner. Anyone who can't keep up pays a fine.

Bennett's almost got it right. The report won't be used as a club to beat up on the Liberals. It will be used as a shield against nutty ideas like Bennett's.

Well, it will be used as a club too. Dion has it coming for cheating.

Now the question is whether Dion's leadership bid survive this.