Angry in the Great White North

Jack Layton is playing Follow The Leader, trailing after Prime Minister Stephen Harper's trip to the Arctic:

NDP Leader Jack Layton departs this morning for a four-day tour to meet ordinary Canadians in the Arctic. An NDP delegation will travel to five arctic communities, meeting with political and community leaders, participating in traditional feasts and seeing first hand the challenges and opportunities facing the North.

“The Prime Minister’s focus on military solutions for Arctic sovereignty is too narrow” said Layton. “The NDP knows that to protect our northern sovereignty means addressing social, economic, and environmental concerns,” said Layton. “The growing prosperity gap, being felt by average individuals and by the communities in which they live needs to be addressed once and for all.”

Also on Layton’s agenda is climate change. “We can’t proclaim sovereignty over our Arctic waters if those same waters are not protected from climate change,” said Layton.

But I thought climate change is what kick-started the Arctic sovereignty gabfest in the first place. If the planet is warming, and the ice caps are melting, then previously inaccessible areas are now open for economically viable exploitation.

If Jack Layton's plan to crush the Canadian economy and so eliminate a fraction of a percent of the total global output of carbon dioxide succeeds in tipping the balance and so causes the Earth to dramatically cool down, the ice returns and the Russians and the Danes and the Americans will all beat a hasty retreat to warmer spots south. Under those circumstances, Canada could proclaim sovereignty over the moon for all that it mattered.

An economically destitute Canada would not be able to maintain sovereignty over Saskatoon if affluent foreigners were to come and start buying up Canada at firesale prices.

Nice try at linking the two, Jack, but sovereignty has nothing to do with global warming. And if you do want to connect the two, I don't think the linkage is going to be quite what you think it is.