Canada Raises Kyoto Eyebrows by Killing EU Summit

"It's very bad international relations strategy by the prime minister," Jack Layton, head of the leftist New Democratic Party (NDP), told Reuters.

Harper's office denied the decision had anything to do with Kyoto and everything to do with his desire, as the head of a minority government, to spend as much time in Ottawa as possible.

"He's committed to governing the country," Harper spokeswoman Carolyn Stewart-Olsen said. "It's all about the day-to-day aspects of governing the country."

Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen of Finland, which holds the rotating EU presidency, called Harper on Friday to inquire about rumors that Canada might not go ahead with plans for the Canada-EU meeting on Nov. 27 in Tampere, Finland.

Harper asked that the meeting be pushed back to 2007.

Beyond that, the two sides offered sharply differing versions on what had been planned.

"There was no definite plan to have a summit," Stewart-Olsen told Reuters, adding that the prime minister's office had never seen an agenda for the trip.

However, on the Finnish EU Presidency's Web site, a news release on Oct. 13 refers to the summit being fixed for Nov. 27.

"It was definitely fixed, that is very clear," said Finland's ambassador to Ottawa, Pasi Patokallio.

He said that just a week ago Canadian and EU officials in Brussels had been working on the agenda for the summit.

The environment and climate change were on the agenda, he confirmed, as they were for EU summits with other countries.

"Obviously we're disappointed and the (Finnish) prime minister indicated that. We were in full swing preparing the summit," he said.

Stewart-Olsen said Harper had already met with Vanhanen and other EU leaders in July during a summit of the Group of Eight leading industrialized nations in St. Petersburg, Russia, but Patokallio said this was a short meeting on the sidelines.

"That's in no way comparable to a (dedicated) summit," he said.

The Nov. 27 date had been picked because it was just before a NATO summit that Harper is to attend just across the Baltic Sea from Finland in Latvia -- a meeting that is likely to be dominated by the war in Afghanistan.

The NDP's Layton said Harper would try to convince Europeans to put more troops into Afghanistan, where 42 Canadian soldiers have been killed.

"Yet he's turning his back on the issue that they want to discuss with Canada, which is fundamentally at root an issue of global human security, which is climate change," Layton said.

Harper's position on Kyoto is that the preceding Liberal government -- which signed the Kyoto Protocol -- let greenhouse gas emissions rise so high that it would be impossible to make the needed reductions by the required 2012 deadline. He has targeted emission caps by major polluters but not until 2020-25.