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Canada & Australia: The new Carbon Club?

Canada and Australia have many things in common, but weather typically isn't one of them. That changed at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting when both Canada and Australia rejected a plan to help poorer countries fight climate change....
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Canada and Australia have many things in common, but weather typically isn't one of them. That changed at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting when both Canada and Australia rejected a plan to help poorer countries fight climate change.


When it's winter in Canada, it's summer in Australia -- the seasons may be out of sync -- but not the thinking on climate.

Canada and Australia have a lot in common -- Large, sparsely populated, Commonwealth countries on opposite edges of the planet. But in recent weeks, and especially since the election of Tony Abbott as the new prime minister in Australia, it seems as though Canada and Australia are starting their own club on climate policy.

When the new Australian Prime Minister moved to scrap that country's carbon tax last week, he received a public statement of congratulations from Stephen Harper's parliamentary secretary.

Just days later, at the Commonwealth meetings in Sri Lanka, an initiative to help fund smaller countries combat climate change gained unanimous support, with the exception of.... Canada and Australia.

And at the UN Climate Change talks wrapping up today in Warsaw, Poland, observers' lists of "countries behaving badly" are consistently topped by Canada and Australia.

Elizabeth May is an MP and leader of Canada's Green Party. She's been attending the UN Climate Change talks in Warsaw, Poland.

Canada's delegation to the UN Climate talks is headed up by environment minister Leona Aglukkaq. She was not available for an interview from Warsaw this morning.

But MP Colin Carrie, the parliamentary secretary to the minister was available. He was in Ottawa.

For more on the increasing alignment between Australia and Canada on climate issues, we were joined by:

Alex White, an Australian author and campaigner who blogs about the environment for The Guardian. He was in our Washington D.C. studio.

And, Ken Green, a senior director of natural resource policy studies at the Fraser Institute. He was in Calgary.

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Tweet us @thecurrentcbc. Follow us on Facebook. Or e-mail us through our website. Call us toll-free at 1 877 287 7366. And as always if you missed anything on The Current, grab a podcast.

This segment was produced by The Current's Peter Mitton.

Last Word - Remembering JFK on Record

We began today's program marking the 50th anniversary of the sad events in Dallas, Texas with a conversation with Clint Hill, the Secret Service agent who was in President Kennedy's motorcade.

And we close today, with another type of remembrance ... songs from the sixties that pay homage to JFK are explored in a multi-media art show that's moving on from Dallas to New York.

The man behind Listening Hard: Remembering JFK On Record is a Texas artist, author, film maker and teacher, who -- as with most Americans -- was deeply moved by events 50 years ago.

For today's Last Word, we ended the week with Alan Govenar and his tribute to the music inspired by JFK.

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