Global warming has been a top issue for much of Canada’s federal election campaign, which ends Tuesday when Canadians will pick a party to form a new government. First affected by changes in the environment are Canadians who live on the northern fringes of the country. Scientists say temperatures are rising much faster in the Arctic than elsewhere.

To gauge how the debate on the environment is playing in Canada’s Great North, Grist spoke by telephone with Donald Mearns in Pangnirtung, on Baffin Island, in the territory of Nunavut. A town of 1,350 people located 30 miles from the Arctic Circle, Pangnirtung is a cluster of wooden homes perched at the rocky union of treeless mountains, a river, and the dramatic Pangnirtung Fjord leading to Cumberland Sound.

Supplies for the town must be flown in or brought by barge in the summer. But much of the food comes from subsistence-hunting of seals and game, fishing, and gathering berries. The people of Pangnirtung have seen unusual spells of warm weather in recent years that bring swift changes in the Arctic landscape on which they depend. Mearns, 48, has lived there for most of the last 30 years.

Let’s set the scene a little bit. What’s the weather today in Pangnirtung?

Donald Mearns: It’s fairly cool. We probably started off at about zero [C] this morning. It would be about plus five [41 degrees F] at the moment.

That’s fairly balmy for you.

Yep. I’m sitting in my shorts right now.

The fjord is not frozen yet?

It’s starting to get slushy. There was even a skin of ice enough that young seals were able to get up on the ice surface out in the fjord. My wife saw a chap getting out there to go hunt the seals, but it was pretty slow going in a boat.

In the meantime, what are hunters doing?

The harp seals are on the go at the moment, getting together and heading south. There’s been a lot of ducks. And a lot of guys are out looking for caribou. My brother-in-law, Noah Metuq, spent a week out looking for caribou and didn’t get any. But other guys have had tremendous success.

So what’s the talk of Pangnirtung these days?

The big excitement has been the new bridge. This spring, we lost the bridge. We had a big melt and it gouged out the river. Basically overnight, the river dropped 15 or 20 feet in depth. The water went down under the permafrost, and there was considerable amount of damage done.

This is very unusual?

This is probably a one-in-10,000-year event.

What caused it?

We had very high temperatures and very heavy rain at the same time. Along with the rain, there was amazing melt. It caused a huge amount of water to come down the river. Because of the constriction of the bridge, the water built up across the road. I have never seen it do that before. Then it just washed everything out.

You were watching this?

Yep. Nobody watched a TV for three weeks. Everybody was down at the river every night to see what was going to happen next. Every single night there was a new event. There was a new crack opening, stuff collapsing. It was amazing to see, just fascinating. It looked like an earthquake. There were a lot of elders down there, and they were really upset. There is a lot of history in pieces of the river for them. They would clean sealskins there and polar bear skins, and they would remember people being at those places, and those places don’t exist anymore. There were elders in tears.

You’ve had some pretty strange weather in Pangnirtung in the past few years. Is this the capstone of that?

This has been the pinnacle of the bizarre weather. We have had some bizarre and huge storms.

Does this have folks in town talking more about global warming?

There is certainly a very strong awareness of climate change. A lot of people say it’s part of a cycle; they are not really very sure. They are noticing differences with animals, noticing the differences in ice conditions, noticing differences in land conditions.

There’s been talk about climate change in the election campaign in Canada. Have folks in town paid attention to the campaign?

People sort of get on with their lives here. More on people’s minds is the Nunavut election, rather than the general election. But certainly in Iqaluit [the capital of Nunavut, 180 miles south of Pangnirtung], the buzz has been about the general election. All three main candidates have made their way to Iqaluit. That has excited people there. There have been fairly big do’s where they have had music. [New Democratic Party candidate] Jack Layton was dancing with the local folks, and some of the musicians from Pangnirtung went down to the NDP event. We’ve also seen [Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader] Stephen Harper in Iqaluit; [Liberal Party candidate] Stéphane Dion was there last week. This is the first time we have seen these politicians up here on the campaign trail. It makes people think that Nunavut is coming of age.

When they have come up, have they talked about how you are on the front line of climate change?

That’s certainly been part of the discussion.

When the hunters are talking about the changes they see that may be related to climate change, do they have any feeling that government can do anything about it?

People are looking at the fact that they are going to need to adapt to deal with the changes that are coming with the climate change. It’s more that, than the feeling that the government can actually make a change to it. Because to be honest, government can’t, overnight. There are going to be a lot of things that happen between now and the next 100 years. We can maybe slow things down, but we are not going to stop it.

So they aren’t paying a whole lot of attention to the campaign?

They are certainly watching it. But, at the moment, there is so much in the news about the American presidential campaign. At coffee today we were talking about things, and the conversations started off with the [U.S.] presidential candidates. Then we moved on the Canadian election and the Nunuavut election as well. There are three sets of elections; it’s election overkill.

At coffee, do you get any sense there is a feeling for one or the other of the Canadian candidates?

People keep their cards pretty close to their chest. I wouldn’t say anyone was saying they were going one way or another.

The economy has overshadowed both the American and the Canadian elections, and overshadowed a lot of the conversation about the environment in the Canadian election. How does concern about the economy play out in Pangnirtung?

For many Inuit, they live from day to day. It’s tough on people here. There are extended families, so money tends to go to the family rather to investments. For many people, they don’t have that option. Nunavut depends on federal money, so if it affects Canada as a whole it eventually will affect Nunavut.

Recent Grist.org coverage of Canada’s national election:

• Shifting Away From the ‘Green Shift’ (22 Sep 2008)
• Committed environmentalist Stéphane Dion faces uphill fight in Canadian election (7 Oct 2008)

Stéphane Dion.

In the bleary dawn of 6 a.m., as the translators threatened to pack up and the janitors hovered to sweep the hall, conference chairman Stéphane Dion got what he wanted — a stubborn Russian gave in and the reluctant Americans signed on. Afterwards, the participants lined up to shake his hand. Among them was Bill Hare, the veteran representative of Greenpeace, usually the harshest critic of the establishment.

“I had never seen Hare do that,” said Steven Guilbeault, who represented the Canadian delegation of Greenpeace. But Dion deserved the praise, he said: “The whole thing could have collapsed.”

The praise for Dion, then Canada’s environment minister, helped catapult the lanky former professor into the leadership ranks of his party and, three years later, into the brawling campaign to be Canada’s next prime minister.

When Canadians go to the polls Oct. 14, they will choose from among four national candidates, with the contest led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper — a conservative from Alberta’s oil patch who has snubbed Kyoto — and Dion, who staked his political future on the accord.

For Dion, 53, it has been a torturous campaign. His environmental proposals have fallen flat, he has been mocked and ridiculed by his opponents, undercut by his political allies, and he faces the prospect of a stunning defeat that may make him one of the few Liberal Party leaders never to become an elected prime minister.

Dion insists he has faced political catastrophe before. “I have been underestimated,” he has said. “It’s my weakness. At the same time, it’s my strength.”

Indeed, the irony of this campaign is that Harper’s Conservative Party has managed to portray Dion as weak and indecisive in spite of a political biography that reflects just the opposite. Dion has stubbornly hewed to the course he thinks is right, even when it was politically toxic.

That trait brought him to public notice in the early 1990s, during one of the periodic flare-ups of the Quebec independence movement. Dion, the son of a noted Quebec political scientist, was teaching at the University of Montreal. He weighed the heated calls of Quebec separatism and decided it was better for the province to remain part of Canada’s federation. It was a highly unpopular view in Quebec.

“I remember the debates on separatism,” said Guilbeault, then a student at the university. “There would be a long line of people waiting to speak on the side of ‘yes’ for separatism. And on the other side, there would be only one person: Dion.”

Dion’s scholarly defense of federalism won the notice of then-prime minister Jean Chretien, who persuaded the reluctant academic to join the cabinet. But it also won Dion bitter condemnation in Quebec. For years, he was drawn as a rat in political cartoons, and described by the French-speaking press as a traitor.

“They even had to post security guards outside of his mother’s house,” said Laurent Arsenault, a friend and high school classmate. “That bothered him. Why do they threaten my mother? he said. But it also lit his fire even more.”

He was an awkward fit in back-slapping political circles. He showed up to join the cabinet with a cheap nylon backpack he had carried back on the campus in Montreal; an amused colleague bought him a leather one. He was more comfortable with academic argument than with the political jab and sound bite. Friends insist he has a quirky sense of humor, but Dion appeared humorless in public. He once famously reprimanded Chretien for not being serious enough.

So he was not considered a strong contender when the Liberals, long the dominant party in Canada, met in December 2006 to pick a party chief to try to regain the government they lost that January to Harper’s Conservatives. But the two top Liberal candidates bucked into a stubborn deadlock at the party convention, and Dion squeezed past them on the fourth ballot; an “accidental winner,” pundits quipped at the time.

Accidental or not, Dion seemed to some the right man on the right horse. Throughout 2007, the environment was at the very top of Canadian voters’ concerns, according to the polls. The country seemed ready for action on the Kyoto Protocol. Dion unveiled an ambitious plan of taxing sources of carbon dioxide — from natural gas to heating oil to diesel fuel — coupled with a cut in business and income taxes. The net result would be a savings for many Canadians, he said, and would bring a historic “green shift” from taxing income to taxing pollution, he argued.

But Harper pounced. His party mounted a series of attack ads. Canada Press, the usually careful news service, compared the approach to “taking a flamethrower to Dion … and it has not stopped for 19 months.” Harper railed that Dion’s Green Shift plan is a crushing new tax that would send the country into recession and divide Canadian provinces.

To the dismay of his supporters and environmentalists, Dion has been unable to recover. The economic clouds in the United States have made Canadian voters nervous, and Dion has failed to convince them the Green Shift would not hurt them economically.

“Most people don’t understand it,” said Vancouver pollster Angus McAllister, who has tracked attitudes on the environment for many years. “They just hear the word tax. They don’t even understand why Dion wants to tax carbon. You give them a multiple choice and they even get it wrong.”

The polls have put the Conservatives 13 or more points ahead of the Liberals, who have lost supporters to other left-of-center parties — the New Democratic Party, the Greens, and the Bloc Quebecois.

“If there were only one opposition party, Harper would be defeated,” McAllister said. But Dion has been unable to prevent the splintering of his allies.

“It’s the agony of being Stéphane Dion,” said Andrew Cohen, an author and political commentator at Carlton University in Ottawa. Dion, bespectacled, thin and publicly awkward, has become a victim of the Conservative caricature, Cohen said, in part because of his language. Although all the candidates in officially bilingual Canada must speak both languages, Dion’s English is delivered with French syntax and a heavy accent. He “doesn’t have an ear for the music of the language,” said one pained listener.

“In fact, Mr. Harper, he speaks better English than me,” Dion conceded at a campaign stop in Halifax last month. “OK. But I say the truth better than him in English and in French.”

In a last effort to avoid a landslide, Dion has tried to move the topic of the campaign away from his Green Shift. He spent much of last week’s nationally televised French and English debates in Ottawa promoting a new economic plan.

It picked up a few points in the polls, but some believe that is too little too late. Faced with the threat the Conservatives will win a majority control of the parliament, even some of Dion’s competitors have come to his defense.

“He is certainly brilliant,” Green Party leader Elizabeth May offered recently. “He’s kind, and he’s decent, and he’s honest. And I hope that doesn’t make him unfit for politics.”

Related links:

• Shifting Away From the ‘Green Shift’, Sept. 22, 2008
• 15 Green Politicians, June 26, 2007
• Selecting Dion, Dec. 5, 2006

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative auction held last Thursday sold all of the 12.6 million allowances offered in this first bidding. Power plants in 10 northeastern states will have to acquire allowances equal to 188 million tons of carbon dioxide, the “cap” set for plants’ 2009 emissions in the region. RGGI will sell the allowances in quarterly auctions, until 2014, when the cap will be reduced by 2.5 percent per year.

“I’m very satisfied with the first auction,” said economist Tom Tietenberg, an expert on emissions trading and a trustee of the fund set up in Maine to use the auction revenues for energy-efficiency programs.

“The initial sale was robust. The prices are reasonable. They weren’t at the minimum floor price,” he said by telephone. “There was a concern that many of the allowances might not be sold and people would sit on the sidelines. None of that happened.”

The RGGI auction rules set a minimum price of $1.86 per ton for the auction, and some had feared the sealed bids would not exceed that, since cold weather and a slower economy in the last couple of years have left power-plant emissions lower than the RGGI cap. Futures markets in New York and Chicago had been trading allowances at between $4 and $5 a ton, speculating that the price would go up as allowances were bought and traded.

“I think this price showed pretty cautious behavior,” said Dallas Burtraw at Resources for the Future, a nonprofit environmental research organization based in Washington. “We’re coming out of two weeks of enormous financial uncertainty. One of the major players in the market, Constellation Energy, just got bought out. People did not know what would happen.”

RGGI officials said Monday that 59 bidders submitted sealed bids, seeking four times the number of allowances sold in this auction. The names of those bidders have not been announced; under RGGI rules, companies and organizations other than power-plant operators can bid on the allowances to hold them for trade and resale to power companies.

Pete Grannis, chair of RGGI, called the participation a “strong start” that successfully set a price on carbon. “This will send a clear market signal to support the investment in clean energy technologies,” he said.

RGGI’s cap on pollution will gradually tighten until greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants are reduced 10 percent by 2019, and the proceeds of the auctions will raise millions of dollars for energy-efficiency programs run by the 10 states.

“This winter, with high prices, is a grave concern. It’s considered by some an actual emergency,” said Tietenberg. “We are going to try our hardest to get this money into programs that will help citizens this winter.”

Dan Genest, a spokesperson for Dominion Power, which owns three plants in New England, said the price of allowances in this auction was “about what we expected.”

A spokesperson for the Independent Power Producers of New York, Chris LaRoe, said the uncertainty about the price was a problem for power-plant owners. “An inability to predict operating costs can send a chill through the investment community,” he said. “It’s very hard to plan going forward when you can’t predict your costs.”

Derek Murrow, director of policy analysis for the nonprofit Environment Northeast, said that because of the recent drop in CO2 emissions in the region, “a low price makes sense to us in this context.” The greater benefit, he said, is in the start of carbon trading.

“It really is the first major auction of emissions allowances,” he said. “The fact that it went smoothly and RGGI is showing that an auction can function, that’s the significance.”

“Twenty-four states are working on cap-and-trade” along with four large Canadian provinces, said Judi Greenwald, of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change in Washington. “The federal government was not doing enough in their judgment. They decided they could not wait.”

Five years in the planning, the northeastern states’ Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) offers what its proponents acknowledge is a “modest” start. It requires a 10 percent reduction in emissions by 2019 — but only in emissions generated by power plants. Some critics note that the program’s carbon caps don’t reflect the fact that milder summers resulted in lower-than-expected energy use in the Northeast over the past few years. In effect, the critics note, the participating states can grow their emissions and still not break the caps.

But RGGI’s supporters are undaunted. They say the program will generate millions of dollars that the states have pledged to use for programs to boost energy efficiency. And they say the program will, for the first time in the United States, set a price on carbon dioxide emissions and provide a model for other states and the federal government.

“I don’t think anyone would argue it’s enough. But it starts the process,” said Daniel Sosland, director of Environment Northeast, a nonprofit advocacy group involved in planning the cap-and-trade effort.

“We have a very short window to get started on global warming,” he said. “And there is a recognition that the state economies will be worse off if we don’t start on it.”

The program’s western counterpart will be more aggressive. Led by California and embracing seven states and four populous Canadian provinces, the Western Climate Initiative will require power plants and industries to cut emissions by 15 percent by 2020. In 2015, the program will expand to cover emissions from transportation, residential, and commercial fuel use.

The western program is scheduled to go into operation in 2012. An initial blueprint [PDF] was released Tuesday, requiring industry to start measuring their greenhouse-gas emissions in about two years. A third program, in the Midwest, last year started planning a cap-and-trade program for six more states and Manitoba. Florida is considering joining one of the regional programs.

These initiatives will bring pressure on the next U.S. president to create a uniform national cap-and-trade program, preempting those who believe the best way to curb carbon emissions is through a direct tax.

“A national program definitely would be much better,” said Radmila Miletich, environmental policy director for the Independent Power Producers of New York. “I do think a national program is coming. Given that, and the very high cost of energy we are all facing, a cautious approach would be best.”

The architects of RGGI say a chief achievement of the planning process was the decision to auction off 100 percent of the allowances that power plants will need to cover their emissions.

Other program designs, including Europe’s approach created under the Kyoto Protocol, gave away part or all of the allowances in a bid to spur the market. In Europe, poor allocation decisions provided a windfall to some industries.

“I think the significance of this program is not really in the emissions reductions that it may achieve. I think the much greater significance is the precedent-setting and the teaching value for national policy,” said Ned Raynolds, who monitored the planning for the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Mass.

Under the RGGI (nicknamed “Reggie”) program, 223 power plants in the Northeast will have to buy allowances for all their C02 emissions, starting in 2009. Power plants will have six years to stabilize emissions, after which they will be required to reduce emissions by 2.5 percent per year for the next four years.

The program applies to power plants in Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Maryland. Power plant emissions are estimated to account for about 25 percent of the total carbon dioxide pollution generated in the area.

Plants that do not meet the goals may be able to purchase “offsets” from projects that create carbon dioxide reductions, such as programs to plant forests or capture escaping methane from landfills. But the use of offsets will be restricted to 3.3 percent of a power plant’s emissions, a concession to critics who say offsets permit companies to buy their way out of pollution rather than reducing their own emissions.

The initial “baseline” goals for 2009 were set in 2005 with a prediction that carbon dioxide emissions from power plants would continue to increase by about 1 percent each year. Instead, energy consumption remained roughly flat in the Northeast, and carbon emissions from the power plants are expected to be about 9 percent below the 2009 baseline set by RGGI.

Analysts say milder weather and a slow economy reduced electric demands, and power plants have switched from expensive oil to cheaper — and less polluting — natural gas or nuclear generation.

“The cap appears to be too high,” said Raynolds. “But it’s good that emissions have gone down.” He acknowledged if that trend continues, the reductions mandated by RGGI would be meaningless. But the program still requires a minimum price — $1.86 per ton for power plant emissions, which Raynolds said will encourage power producers and their larger customers to consider alternative power sources.

RGGI already has spawned two “futures” markets, in New York and Chicago, that bet on the future prices of the carbon allowances. Those futures have been trading at between $4 and $5 a ton. Power plant operators have three years before they have to turn over their 2009 allowances, and many are expected to wait to see where the price settles. The auction Thursday will offer allowances for only 12.6 million of 2009′s 188 million tons allowed, and observers expect it to be a limited “price setting” auction.

Miletich, whose group represents 75 percent of the New York power producers, said customers will see their electricity bills rise by an amount that depends on the final price of the allowances.

“There’s no way to know what this will cost,” she predicted.

Others don’t believe that price increases will be noticeable. “The rate impact will be less than 5 to 10 percent over 20 years,” said Seth Kaplan, vice president for climate advocacy of the Conservation Law Foundation. The increase “is pretty much lost in the noise.”

More importantly, he says, the energy efficiency programs that will be funded by the auctions will help consumers reduce their overall bills.

“This money will prime the pump,” he said.

HOW RGGI WORKS

Power companies in the participating states submitted sealed bids for the first auction, scheduled for Sept. 25.

In the first auction, RGGI offer allowances for only 12.6 million of 2009′s 188 million tons allowed, and observers expect it to be a limited “price setting” auction.

The initial auction involves allowances from six states — Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Other states are expected to participate in a second auction scheduled for Dec. 17. Carbon allowances purchased from one state can be transferred by a purchaser to cover emissions generated in another RGGI state.

Bidders will be notified of the auction results by Sept. 29. Results from the first auction can be tracked here.

After the RGGI states have stabilized power sector carbon emissions at their capped level by 2014, the cap will be reduced each year from 2015 through 2018.

Check out a New York Times infographic on carbon emissions in the 10 RGGI states.

It looked like an environmentalist’s dream — a national debate over climate change, with voters left to decide on which route to take to reduce greenhouse gases.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Photo courtesy Office of the Prime Minister

But politics has steered the debate in new directions, making it less likely that the result will be a mandate for major action on climate issues. The ruling Conservative Party has scoffed at significant greenhouse-gas reductions and painted the opposition plans as dangerous tax boosts. The opponents are divided and squabbling. The main Liberal Party challenger, a former environment minister with a dog named Kyoto, has been tarred as bumbling and ineffective.

Voters, rather than rallying to save the environment, tell pollsters they plan to strengthen the hold on power of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, an outcome analysts agree would mean business-as-usual for Canadian polluters.

“I’m appalled,” said John Bennett, a former Sierra Club officer and now a key strategist for Canada’s small Green Party. “For two and a half years, we were aiming to have this election be about climate change. But every election, that issue fades as we get closer to election time, and it seems to be happening again now.”

Instead, Canadians are worried about the economy, especially in the key electoral battleground of Ontario, where the faltering auto industry helped swell the country’s manufacturing job losses to 88,000 in the last year.

“The economy is the overriding issue. It’s the No. 1 concern here. Voters see what’s happening in the States, and they are worried about layoffs here,” said Bob Hepburn, a columnist for the Toronto Star.

“The Liberals are making the environment their No. 1 issue. But Harper just keeps saying, ‘It’s a tax, it’s a tax.’”

Liberal Party leader Stéphane Dion.

Photo courtesy Liberal Party

The opponents bristle at that tactic. The Liberals, led by Stéphane Dion, have proposed a carbon tax on coal, natural gas, oil, heating fuel, diesel fuel, and gasoline wholesalers starting at $10 a ton and rising to $40 a ton. All the money raised by that levy would be returned to taxpayers through a variety of income and business tax cuts under the party’s “Green Shift” plan, the Liberals say.

“The Conservatives forget the other side, which is a tax shift. It’s dollar for dollar back” to taxpayers, said George Young, a Liberal Party spokesperson. “Of course, the Conservative approach has been not to discuss the concept at all. Their approach has been to try to ‘Swift Boat’ it with a massive ad campaign that has been very negative and personal.”

Harper, who came from Canada’s oil-flush Alberta province to lead the Conservatives to power in February 2006, has been scathing in his criticism. When the “Green Shift” was unveiled last summer, Harper called it “crazy economics” that would “screw everybody across the country.” This month, he warned it would “wreak havoc on the economy” and could pull Canada apart.

The dire drumbeat seems to be working. Dion last week downplayed the importance of the “Green Shift” plan; a gleeful Conservative strategist called it a “full retreat.” Public opinion polls suggest Harper’s Conservatives, who now govern as the largest minority with 41 percent of the House of Commons, will win another controlling minority and could come within striking distance of becoming a majority party for the first time in 15 years.

“For environmentalists, that would not be a good thing,” said Mark Winfield, a political scientist and professor of environmental studies at York University in Toronto. “It would mean an electoral rejection of Dion’s bold proposal, and would scare people off from trying that in the future.”

Winfield is alarmed that he sees the environment becoming a line of demarcation in Canadian politics, just as the Republican Party’s “Drill, baby, drill” chant has become a symbol of division in the American political campaign.

“The idea was that the environment was supposed to be a nonpartisan issue,” Winfield said. “Up until now, I don’t think you had seen a party running on an almost anti-environmental platform,” as the Conservatives are.

The Sierra Club of Canada gave Harper’s environmental platform an F-plus grade, while the Liberals scored a B-plus and the Green Party an A-minus, according to Jean Langlois, the Sierra Club’s national campaign director. The Conservative Party has proposed a program reliant on new technology to lower emissions, a program that Langlois said was “frankly not even trying,” and analysts said would not significantly lower emissions.

“The very first step you have to do is stop the growth” in carbon emissions, replied Goldy Hyder, a senior advisor to the Conservative campaign. “Then you stabilize it and hold it there for awhile. You can’t do dramatic shifts for the economy. Only then will you be able to reverse emissions rates and bring them down.

“Now is not the time, with gas and energy prices what they are, to be talking to consumers and saying, ‘I want to tax you more,’” Hyder said.

Supporters of the carbon tax are discouraged they have been unable to sell the argument that tough action on the environment can actually create jobs and boost the economy, not bankrupt it.

But the self-image of Canadians as fiercely protective of the environment is largely myth, said Nelson Wiseman, author of the book In Search of Canadian Political Culture. “The environment is a leisure issue — something we talk about when we have leisure time,” he said.

Canada signed the Kyoto Protocol, but successive governments have done nothing to implement it, and Canada’s greenhouse-gas emissions have grown. The country is now third in the world — behind the United States and Australia — in tons of carbon dioxide emitted per capita.

Still, the polls have been shifty, and the environmental issue could again seize the electorate in the final stretch of the campaign, Wiseman acknowledged.

“Right now, they are still watching the Food Channel or Comedy Central,” he said. “People will get focused in the last week to 10 days of the election.”