The federal Liberals attempted yesterday to paint Prime Minister Stephen Harper as a skeptic on global warming, as a new letter emerged in which he had questioned the climate predictions of leading scientists and described the international Kyoto agreement as a "socialist scheme."
The comments were part of a fundraising campaign started by the Canadian Alliance with Mr. Harper as leader in October 2002, to stop the former Liberal government from ratifying what Mr. Harper described as the "so-called" Kyoto accord on climate change.
"I'm talking about the 'battle of Kyoto' -- our campaign to block the job-killing, economy-destroying Kyoto Accord," Mr. Harper wrote in the letter that was distributed to reporters yesterday by the Liberals. "It's based on tentative and contradictory scientific evidence about climate trends. It focuses on carbon dioxide, which is essential to life, rather than upon pollutants." The letter surfaced on the eve of the release of a major scientific review that is expected to leave little doubt that greenhouse gas pollution from humans is accelerating climate change.
But Mr. Harper's letter disputed scientific evidence available at the time. "Implementing Kyoto will cripple the oil and gas industry," he wrote. "As the effects trickle through other industries, workers and consumers everywhere in Canada will lose. There are no Canadian winners under the Kyoto accord. The only winners will be countries such as Russia, India, and China, from which Canada will have to buy 'emissions credits.' Kyoto is essentially a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations." Mr. Harper also wrote that his party was "leading the battle against the Kyoto Accord," and it would "take an army of Canadians to beat Kyoto, just as it did to beat (the) Charlottetown (constitutional agreement)." The Liberals released the letter in response to Tory attack ads that criticize Liberal leader Stephane Dion's record on the environment.
---------------------------------------------------- http://www.liberal.ca/pdf/docs/HarperLetter.pdf 
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