Harper and Schwarzenegger an environmental odd couple

Date: 31-05-2007 Posted by: Anabolic Info TeamCanada

What do an extroverted, muscular California politician and a slightly flabby, straight-laced Canadian prime minister have in common?

Not a lot. In fact, Stephen Harper and Arnold Schwarzenegger make a most unlikely pair.

But they huddled Wednesday in Ottawa for a one-on-one, each for his own political purpose.
For Schwarzenegger of course, the confab was a no-brainer, given that Canada is a major trade and tourism market for his state.

But it should be noted that Canada's prime minister does not make time for a meeting and photo op for every state governor who ventures north. Normally, governors are directed to do business with premiers.

In fact Schwarzenegger is doing a fair bit of mingling with Canadian premiers, signing environmental accords with Ontario's Dalton McGuinty on Tuesday and B.C.'s Gordon Campbell today.

But Harper, too, made time in his schedule to host the high-profile governor. The meeting surely was a welcome event for a PM under pressure to prove his government's environmental sustainability bona fides.

Liberals, Greens and New Democrats have been working overtime to portray their parties as champions of the environment, in contrast to what they contend are the climate-change-denying Conservatives.

Conservatives came to the cause late in the game, with Environment Minister John Baird releasing his environmental blueprint only a month ago.

Called "Turning the Corner, An Action Plan to Reduce Greenhouse Gases and Air Pollution," the document has received the most lukewarm of reviews from environmentalists.

The Harperites are hoping that Canadians will notice that Schwarzenegger, like Harper, is on the right of the political spectrum. He's a Republican in good standing and, from that spot on the partisan spectrum, he shines as a beacon of things green.

Schwarzenegger recently was introduced at a public event by former Massachusetts governor William Weld as "a hero and a visionary in the environmental area . . . . The governor's environmental credentials are beyond impeccable."

Schwarzenegger's pitch is that global warming is no longer a Democratic or Republican issue. The former action-hero movie star compares environmentalism to bodybuilding, describing it as a phenomenon that is emerging from the shadows to become mainstream.

"Like bodybuilders, environmentalists were also thought of as being kind of weird and strange and fanatics, the kind of serious tree huggers," Schwarzenegger said in a recent speech. "Environmentalists were no fun."

The new environmentalism is fun, insists the celebrity governor, who is busy promoting California as a U.S. leader in the fight against climate change.

His gubernatorial website touts policies on a wide range of fronts, from tax reductions for solar roofs to a mandatory low-carbon standard for transportation fuels to innovative water conservation measures to new ethanol filling stations.

Harper, for his part, comes to the policy issue from an entirely different place.

Canada's prime minister is an economist who frets about the fiscal impact on industry of change not directly driven by the marketplace. He also happens to be a Calgary MP, from an energy-producing, highly polluting province. For him, the environmental challenge does not appear to have much fun attached.
The odd comparison with bodybuilding likely would have been lost on Harper -- unless Schwarzenegger imparted his insight to the PM with a lot of California chardonnay on hand.

In any event, being associated with an environmental activist comes at a propitious time for Harper as he prepares for a trip next week to Heiligendamm, a Baltic Sea resort in Germany, where G-8 leaders will gather to debate the environment.

On the table for negotiation leading up to the summit has been a European Union-backed plan to set targets and timetables for cutting global greenhouse gas emissions by half in relation to 1990 levels, by 2050.
Noting the U.S. is opposed to such strict limits, Harper this week told the Commons there's no point in Canada and the EU moving on climate change in a direction which the U.S., China and India have no intention of following.

Meanwhile, a Canadian environmental group, Friends of the Earth, added to the complexity of the green debate on Tuesday by applying a boot to the backside of the Harper government.

Friends of the Earth launched a court challenge against the feds, asserting that Ottawa is in "flagrant breach" of Canada's international obligations under the Kyoto Protocol.

Not even a Kindergarten Cop could find common ground in the midst of so much dissension.