On brownfields

It took a few days after the story first emerged, but a couple of Libs have finally noticed that their party voted with the Harper Cons against greenhouse gas emission targets. And particular credit goes to Eugene Forsey Liberal for actually questioning why the Libs voted down a bill which they'd passed in a previous incarnation and approved of when it was actually debated in Parliament.

Meanwhile, Jeff Jedras looks to be the first to actually try to defend the Libs' move. Except that he overlooks a glaringly obvious point in doing so.

After all, it's utterly nonsensical to start bringing up points about "due consideration" of a bill which has already been debated and passed with the support of the Libs. Which means that the calculation made by the Libs does appear to have been exactly what Janyce McGregor reported:

(A) minority of Liberals evidently wanted to look like they supported action on climate change, and voted against a further delay. But on the other hand, more of them were said to be reluctant to support a bill that would allow the NDP to claim any edge or victory as far as championing environmental causes in Parliament. The fact that enough of them voted in favour (so the extension would pass) ironically made it easier for a few of them to take their policy stand and vote against, without any serious consequences. Get it?

Now, it may well be that the fourteen MPs lionized by Eugene Forsey Liberal were in fact more concerned with whether they'd "look like they supported action" than with whether or not any actually got taken. But the fact that the vast majority of the Libs' MPs in attendance preferred to get nothing done for the sole purpose of avoiding some credit going to the NDP speaks volumes about where the Libs' priorities lie.

As for the blog response (or lack thereof): just so there's no doubt, I don't think for a second that there's any "conspiracy" afoot. While the Libs' silence would in fact make far more sense if it could be traced to some Harper-style diktat decreeing that any Lib discussing the issue would be placed just behind Denis Coderre on the party's list of untouchables, I don't think anybody would pretend that's how the blogosphere works. And indeed, if there had been some order that the topic be left alone issued to the range of bloggers on two aggregators reflecting a broad spectrum of party loyalty and independence, that itself would figure to have been made public in a hurry (and spurred more discussion of the topic).

But it looks to me even more damning that the same attitude which caused three-quarters of the Libs' MPs who showed up for the vote to take a stand against the environment just to spite the NDP also seems to be prevalent among the Libs' online supporters. In effect, that would suggest to me that the grassroots are actually even more jaded and withered when it comes to interest in the environment than the Libs' caucus. And if that's the case, then the Libs presumably won't see any reason to do anything more than pay lip service to the environment as Lib and Con governments alike have done for the last 16 years.

(Edits: fixed wording, corrected EFL's name.)