Canadian Politics: The Case Of The Vanishing Kyoto Accord

It only took me until noon to decide that I wasn’t going to like Monday that week, which usually meant that the rest of the week lay stretched out in front of me as invitingly as a three day old corpse in July on the slab. August in Ottawa was so putrid with humidity that even the politicians had fled the luxury of their expense account lives and mistresses to return to the loving arms of family and constituents.

Obviously that meant a drastic improvement in the air quality for those of us still here. Talk about global warming and the release of dangerous emissions all you want, there’s nothing that can compete with the Canadian House of Commons for being a source of C02 and, dependant on what was on the menu at the Commons Cafeteria, other noxious fumes.

I was sitting by the one window in the office that could open with a fan blowing, hoping to capture something cooling from the oozing fetidness that passes for a breeze at this time of year. Damn it, I thought, this is ridiculous. We’re in the capital city with coldest mean temperature of any country’s seat of power. Moscow may have slightly longer winters, and may even get days colder than Ottawa’s coldest, but on average we take the cake.

I had entered into that pre-heatstroke daze of semi consciences when the sounds of the phone ringing and someone rapping at the door nearly stopped my heart for good. Unpeeling myself from the back of the chair was a matter moments and allowed me to reach the phone within ten rings and yell to the door “Hold your horses”. If I had hoped that standing at the phone would give me time to get what felt like a yard of cotton out of my butt cleavage, I was sorely disappointed.

The voice on the other end of the phone was succinct and to the point. “Where has all the water gone?” was followed by a renewal of the dial tone. Swearing under my breath at phone pranksters abusing old song lyrics I really wasn’t prepared for what was waiting behind the door. Considering the circumstances I think my reaction was within reason.

She had to be about 5’9″ and her three-inch heels only added to the illusion that her legs went up to her chin. Which should have been physically impossible given what lay between the waist and the long swan-like neck, but go figure. Human anatomy has never been my strong suit, but I could see that she would be a wonderful textbook if I ever decided to broaden my horizons and open my mind to new areas of learning.

I could tell any hopes that I may have had of leafing her pages were minimized by the “Holy Fuck’ that had slipped out of my mouth on opening the door. The part of my brain that still functioned realized the longer I stayed there gaping like some slack jawed inbred was reducing the chances of me even getting a peek inside the cover. Even so it took a loud throat clearing on her part to get me to come around

Still not trusting myself to speak I stood aside and bowed her ever so slightly into the room indicating the chair directly across my desk from my own. Following her back across the room I was reminded of why I had put the desk at the point in the room furthest from the door. Of course it didn’t do my equilibrium any good, so by the time we sat facing each other across a span of pine veneer, I was quite ready to jump out the window if she demanded.

She looked at me and shook her head slightly, which had the effect of making her ash brown hair float halo like around her face. “All you guys are the same aren’t you,” she said piercing me with the ice chips that were her steel grey eyes. I all of sudden felt pinned to the back of my chair like a butterfly under glass.

After three false tries I managed to get my voice to squeak out ” What brings you here today, Miss, what can I do for you?” Instead of the hoped for steady and reassuring voice that was normally at my disposal, I sounded like I had small cricket in my throat.

She looked at me with a grim little smile that implied she didn’t think there was much of anything that I’d be able to help her with, but her options were limited. “First of all it’s Mrs. not Miss, Ms. or anything implying availability of any kind what so ever.” She paused to see what kind of effect that might have on me. Since I was still too numb to do anything but sit and nod blanked faced, there was nothing to indicate how much or little impact her being married might have effected me.

With a purse of her lips, which could have expressed some mild disappointment in reaction to my seemingly nonchalant attitude about her place on the open market she began to talk again. It turns out this drop dead gorgeous woman is in fact a professor of Marine Biology specializing in ecosystems and other words that just were too many syllables for a day like this.

She talked about a lot of things that didn’t make any sense but a picture started to evolve of something terrible happening. The average mean temperature was rising around the world by a degree or so a year, and had been for the last ten year or so. Sure it meant warmer winters, but that meant less snow, which meant less spring melt.

When the spring melt is reduced, the water table is reduced and the level in the rivers and lakes drops. The less ground water there is the lower the likelihood of rain which in turn depletes the water table and the lakes and rivers and so on. She stopped than and I looked at her in horror.

“If it’s allowed to continue the climate will continue to change and we’ll be living in a desert but worse. A desert has its own natural ecosystem, but here if there is an enforced desert the first things to go will be the trees, followed by the shrubbery and then finally the smaller plants

Farm crops will be devastated and we will no longer be able to produce basics like corn and wheat in amounts sufficient for feeding ourselves. The animal life won’t be able to adapt quickly enough as there won’t be time for successful mutations to increase the gene pool and allow evolution to occur.”

For the second time that day she had stunned me and left me sitting with my jaw agape. This couldn’t be possible was my first thought, but it was of course, even during the ice break-up during the spring the Ottawa River failed to rise to the level it had achieved last year let alone any of the previous ones.

She watched me come to these realizations on my own before she continued, “What I need you to do is find out what happened to the Kyoto accord. Parliament had ratified it in the last administration, but now Steven Harper and his Conservative Party Of Canada have said they are going to renege on our country’s commitments to meeting certain reductions in toxic emissions.

We think somebody got to him and is putting pressure on him to do this. There can be no other reason whatsoever to go back on a promise to the world. No one could be that inconsiderate or stupid without having a good reason.”

She stopped again and looked straight into my eyes, those grey chips of ice had melted into something sad and scared. “Please find the Kyoto accord and bring it back. It wasn’t the best solution in the world but it was the only one we had”

How could I say no to that?