EMMISSIONS PROBLEM:

He's unbelievable!: Is there no end to Paul Martin's grand pronouncements, stirring appeals, and full-of-holes commitments? Talk about your gaseous emissions. (PAUL WELLS

They do politics differently in places where it actually matters. In Ottawa, we tend to surf contentedly on assumptions born from prosperity: that policy is boring, that hard choices are a downer, that only personality can sell papers. But Paul Martin began his second week of campaigning at a radio station in St. John's, Nfld., on a brutal rainy Monday morning. He soon learned that in a place where government can make the difference between lighter and darker shades of grief, the questions tend to be more pointed.

Martin's host on VOCM Radio, Randy Simms, didn't waste a second on the subjects that normally transfix the Bytown gallery (Is Peter staring at Belinda? What are the "optics" of this or that?). Instead, he worked hard to pin Martin down on a checklist of local desiderata. The whole process was amazingly businesslike and unsentimental, as shakedowns often are.

Would Martin extend custodial management to the fisheries on the nose and tail of the Grand Banks, shooing away foreign fishing boats even more than 200 miles offshore? Would he help pay for the Lower Churchill hydro development? Couldn't he build up the Canadian Forces base at 5 Wing Goose Bay? "Obviously you currently hold 8 1/2 per cent of Hibernia, as an asset to the Canadian government," Simms said at one point. "You've made a lot of money on it. We'd like to have it now."

The barrage of requests would have brought an ordinary man to his knees, but Paul Martin is made of sterner stuff. There is no known request he can't kind-of seem, briefly, to be sort-of fulfilling. The Lower Churchill? "This is really up to the province. But does the federal government want it to go forward? Yes, we do." Custodial management? "I think this is a huge problem."

But as the reporters travelling with Martin listened to a live audio feed of his chat with Simms in a boardroom down the hall from the studio, what quickly became apparent was how full of holes Martin's commitments really are. [...]

On Wednesday, Martin gave a blandly hortatory speech to the UN Climate Change Conference in Montreal, a global meeting to begin designing a sequel to the Kyoto accord on greenhouse gas emissions. He opened yet another news conference by reading a statement that would take little time to come back to haunt him. "To the reticent nations, including the United States, I'd say this: there is such a thing as a global conscience, and now is the time to listen to it."

It was a striking choice of words. A "conscience" is normally understood as a sense of one's own responsibilities. But Canada has increased its greenhouse gas emissions by 24 per cent since 1990, the United States by only 13 per cent. If the U.S. had been as profligate over the same period as Canada, it would have spat an extra 662 million tonnes of carbon products into the air last year. That's more than Britain's total emissions in 2003. The gap between Martin's remarks and the truth is as big as Britain. Usually when a politician utters a whopper, you can't actually give the whopper a name. But you can name this one. You can call it Britain. Say hello to Britain, the whopper.

After visiting Montreal, Martin stopped in Toronto to announce a total ban on handguns. Well, not total: the ban would exempt gun-club members and, for five years, collectors who would then have to join gun clubs. The same two groups are exempted today from a near-total ban that has been in place for decades. And individual provinces would have a right to opt out. That's going to be a bit tricky, because if you can obtain handguns in even one province, then unless you plan to station border guards between the provinces, you might as well try to ban clouds.

In the space of a single week, Martin had skated himself offside the truth on climate studies, phone-in calls, referendum elections, tax policy, daycare, handguns, and, ironically, given the rest of it, gaseous emissions.