A step forward

There is some good news on the environmental front, as the Libs were apparently cowed enough by the backlash against their plan to abandon any binding targets for greenhouse gas emission reductions to vote in favour of the NDP's Climate Change Accountability Act:

Climate change harmony has been restored between the Liberals, New Democrats, the Bloc Québécois and Ottawa environmentalists – for now.

The three opposition parties joined forces Wednesday afternoon, winning a 141-128 second reading vote on a NDP private members bill dealing with climate change. The bill will now be studied by the House of Commons environment committee.

New Democrats stirred up a behind-the-scenes lobbying campaign over the weekend after receiving signals that Liberals intended to break ranks with a long-standing opposition pact on climate change targets.
...
"We're going to take this bill to committee and we're going to examine it. We're going to examine the targets," Mr. McGuinty said. "And we're going to rework it."

Whether the targets will be reworked up or down, Liberals aren't saying. But for now, all of this is fine with Mr. Layton.

"We're certainly open to fine tuning but this bill," the NDP leader said.

Mind you, it's not clear that the Libs' new position - to the effect that it's the targets within the bill that they want to see reworked - makes the least bit of sense given their rhetoric last week. After all, McGuinty's previous stance was supposedly based on disagreeing withthe idea of implementing binding targets at all without a complete plan to reach them - in effect holding any progress on the emission reductions hostage as long as Michael Ignatieff keeps the Cons in power.

But even if the Libs have contradicted themselves, they at least come out on the right side of the issue for today's vote. And hopefully they'll remain there as the bill continues on its way through Parliament.

Edit: fixed typos.