Bill axed

OTTAWA - Opposition MPs and environmental activists say Canada is going into global-warming talks empty-handed after a majority of Conservative senators voted down a climate-change bill.

A snap vote in the Senate on Tuesday caught Liberals in the upper house off guard, and not enough Grits showed up to save the bill from losing by a margin of 43-32.

NDP Leader Jack Layton, whose party introduced the bill, created by Thunder Bay-Superior North MP Bruce Hyer, called it "outrageous" an unelected Senate can kill what he says is important legislation.

He said Canada now has nothing to show heading into a coming round of United Nations climate talks in Mexico.

"The government has no plan going into a conference on the future of the climate-change crisis in this country," he said.

"Canada will be one of the few, probably the only country, who has absolutely nothing. The only thing we had going for us was that the House of Commons had adopted the targets established by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning scientists of the United Nations, who represent the best thinking globally."

But Marjory LeBreton, leader of the government in the Senate, said the bill would have hurt Canada's economy if passed into law.

"The government has always had on the record it didn't support the bill," she said.

"So when (Liberal Senator) Grant Mitchell forced a vote at second reading, the government obviously was going to use the opportunity to vote against the bill, which we did, and killed it."

The bill — the Climate Change Accountability Act — had spent the last year or so bouncing between the House of Commons and its environment committee.

The Commons passed the bill in May and it went to the Senate for final approval.

The legislation calls for greenhouse gases to be cut 25 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020.

That's more stringent than the Harper government's goal of a 17 per cent emissions cut from 2005 levels by 2020, which is in line with the Obama administration's targets in the United States.

The Conservatives have hitched their policy on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to that of the Obama administration in Washington, arguing a continental approach is required given the two countries' tight trading relationship.

But a Republican rout in the U.S. midterm elections held earlier this month all but dashed any hope of American movement on the file for the next two years.

Acting Environment Minister John Baird was in Washington on Wednesday for a meeting of the Major Economies Forum. He defended the Conservative government's environmental track record, noting new regulations for tailpipe emissions from cars and trucks.

"We're not waiting for Cancun. We're not waiting for the future. We're actually making decisions now," Baird said.

Environmentalists decried the bill's defeat.

"As we head into the UN climate talks in Cancun later this month, it is unacceptable that Canada's only climate-change legislation has been defeated after years of majority support from our elected members of Parliament and their constituents," Graham Saul of the Climate Action Network Canada said in a statement.

"It is astonishing to learn that, mere days before the next major round of international climate negotiations, the Canadian Senate killed the Climate Change Accountability Act," added Andrea Harden-Donahue of the Council of Canadians in her own statement.

Delegates from nearly 200 countries will meet in the resort town of Cancun later this month and try to broker an international climate-change deal.

But Canada and the United States are already looking beyond Cancun to next year's talks in South Africa, where they say a climate deal is more likely to be reached.