Canada's widely criticized withdrawal from the Kyoto protocol ends a decade-long saga that began in earnest when former President George W. Bush walked away from the global climate change treaty in 2001.
Bush did it.
Wow! I didn't even see that one coming!
Seriously. That came out of nowhere. It's late 2011 and Canada withdraws from the Kyoto Treaty. Bush left office nearly three years ago. And Bush walked away from the treaty (which, since our Senate wouldn't pass it was just a formality of recognizing it was dead rather than actually killing it--no matter how much it deserved a mercy killing). But the writer draws a direct line from Bush to Canada a decade later. Wow! And double wow!
How is this possible? Let the man school you, son!
The close links between the two economies, and the fact the United States has a population almost 10 times larger than that of Canada, meant that Ottawa ultimately felt it had to follow Washington's lead and ignore the diplomatic fallout.
"That's the reality. If the Americans move we'll move in lock-step with them because of the integrated nature of the economies," said Fen Hampson, director of the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa.
Well there you go! The poor Canadians couldn't resist. How could they? They might have gotten a sternly worded letter from someone in the international community. In French and English. A bilingual thrashing is too much for a polite nation such as Canada to endure. Canada suffered 158 dead in some of the toughest combat any nation has fought in Afghanistan. But that pales in comparison to the pain of an official rebuke from some undersecretary of somethingorother in the UN's field office in Ghent.
Besides, they are compelled to synchronize their policies with ours. It's the exact same reason Canada sent a battle group to invade Iraq in 2003, that they refuse to even consider adopting nationalized medicine, and why they force their football players to go 10 meters in only 3 downs. It explains the reason they put Mayonnaise on french fries and why their Canada Day has moved closer to our Independence Day over the years. It used to be May 25th but having only a tenth of our population, naturally gravitated to July 1st. Give it another decade or two and we'll be fully synchronized on July 4th at last. We're freaking integrated, eh?
Bush Derangement Syndrome at its worst. The soothing balms of hope and change had no effect, despite liberal application for the last 35 months. So sad, really.
