Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer has finally crossed the floor-level bar set for him on environmental policy.  He has released a document with the words "environment" and "plan" both in the title.

They've also liberally peppered the word "real" in there, by calling it a "real plan."  Anything that requires explicit branding as "real" is a giant red flag that it is not, in fact, real.

In his brief introduction statement to the document, Scheer makes sure to use the phrase "real plan" four times in a brisk 500 words*.

But that's not the only repetition in this document.  There are a number of phrases that get hammered again and again.  Not just in the parts where the document is explaining what the plan is, but also the turgid first portion where the Conservatives talk about how bad the Liberals are.

It has three guiding principles: "Green Technology, Not Taxes"; "A Cleaner and Greener Natural Environment"; and "Taking the Climate Change Fight Global."  Each of these principles is absurdly capitalized, and endlessly repeated throughout the document.

And that kind of gives you an idea of what this document really is.  It's not a policy plan, it's a communications document.  It's a spin plan.

To make that clear, one of the planks of the green technology section of the document is to set up a federal-level equivalent of Alberta's so-called energy war room.  The idea is that, essentially, Canadian products and resources don't get the proper rhetorical credit for how much cleaner — note the relative nature of "cleaner" — they are than their foreign competitors.  Scheer's government would fix that by making a bunch of labels to slap on stuff that read "Canadian Clean."

Just to give you an idea of how empty this is, one of the products Scheer wants to label as "Canadian Clean" is aluminum.  The trouble with aluminium is that for every tonne of it you make, two tonnes of carbon are released.  Canada's aluminum is certainly produced with less carbon than elsewhere, thanks in large part to 90 percent of the metals' production taking place in Québec, where the grid is largely powered by hydro electric dams.  But the 2:1 carbon to aluminum ratio still stands **.

It's also a document peppered with self-congratulation.  The independent research used is "great."  The stakeholder consultations were — are? — "endless."  The work putting it together was "hard."  All that back patting is just from the first sentence of the introduction.

It also complains the Liberals climate plan "gives polluters a pass" and says he would be different, because the Conservative plan would expand the number of companies on the hook by changing the threshold to 40 kilotonnes of CO2 emissions from 50 kilotonnes.  This would, yes, catch more companies in its net.  But a company pumping out 39.9 kilotonnes of CO2 would still be given a pass, to pick a phrase out of nowhere.

It also requires that companies emitting more than a certain amount — the actual threshold will be figured out at a later date, we're assured — would have to invest an amount — the size of which would depend on how much they'd over-polluted — into green technologies.  But this isn't a tax, you see, it's a mandatory investment in green technology to be certified by federal oversight.  Very different from a tax.

The plan, of course, also includes some consumer goodies in the form of a tax credit to make your home more energy efficient.  There's also a credit if you patent "green" technologies, and the promise of a tech hub, and an innovation fund.

There are some interesting ideas in there, such as connecting remote communities to the power grid, rather than having them rely on diesel generators for power.  And increasing the amount of nuclear power produced in the country.  Investing more money in carbon reduction technology is certainly decent.

So much of the document is a broad sketch aimed not really at reducing carbon emissions in Canada, but placing the blame elsewhere and promising to export solutions abroad so everyone else can fix their problems.  It is, in many respects, an abdication of any of the moral necessity to clean up our own mess no matter how much dirtier someone else may be.  We can do both things at once.

But let's forget about morality and tax credits and all that for a moment.  The trick with this Conservative plan-thing, is this is all they needed.  For more than a year now Scheer has been dogged by questions of when he'd be releasing a climate change plan.  The lack of a plan has lingered for so long, the implication there never would be a plan at all. (Oops, guilty.)

The point of the Conservative plan is merely that a stack of paper needs to exist.  And here it is, existing.  Scheer was asked merely to show up, now he has.

Such is politics, an ever baser game of gotcha, never really about what a thing is, but how it looks from afar.

***

* This column, by comparison, is a little more than 900 words long.

** There is a pilot project in Québec involving a new smelting process that releases no carbon, but it hasn't been proven on an industrial scale, and is nowhere close to replacing the current production country-wide.  Canada currently produces about 3.2 million tonnes of aluminum every year.  You can read more about the carbon-free process here, in CIM Magazine, on page 21.

Photo Credit: CBC News