However, according to the 21 APEC leaders failure is apparently an option, if you commit to it early enough in advance.

It does not take a trained eye to see this is all about spin and setting, or rather lowering, expectations. The thinking goes something like this ‘better to announce failure in advance, than be surprised or have to explain it later.’

As a communications strategy there is a school of thought that supports this approach and that’s okay if your talking about say the Toronto Maple Leafs where the worst possible outcome resulting from planned failure is, well, better luck next season.

But where, literally, there might not be a next season, surely world leaders can do better than succumb to defeat.

Some world leaders are still hiding behind the notion they are protecting economic self-interest while others see the task as simply too administratively daunting and impossible to overcome. Both great excuses for the status quo without entirely giving the impression of doing nothing.

John Ibbitson nails it when writing about the outcome of Copenhagen “All will be in, though no one will be able to say what “in” means.”

Had that been the attitude in 1970, the Apollo 13 crew never would have made it home. And yes, the Leafs lost to Calgary last night, 5-2.

Since late August I’ve bounced from topic to topic trying to decide which to resume writing about when fall arrived.

With keen interest I read what others I enjoy so much (Hebert, Coyne, Paikin, Gregg, MacGregor, Ibbitson, Mercer, and others) leapt back into action with following their respective summer sabbaticals. I get a kick trying to read between the lines to see what, if any, epiphanies others have whilst recharging batteries and resetting ones compass.

Mine was going to be about Austin, who in May turned 14, but by mid-August had matured in ways I will save to write about another time.

Next I thought to write about the start of the Ontario election campaign and two key strategy errors that could have been avoided, one by John Tory and the other by Dalton McGuinty, but that topic too will have to wait a few more days.

Instead, with morning coffee in hand, I am shocked to read Warming ‘opens Northwest Passage’.

The shock is not that it’s happening. Experts have been warning about this phenomenon long enough. Indeed, the shock and dismay I am experiencing has to do with something else altogether. Read this excerpt:

“The opening of the sea routes is already leading to international disputes. Canada says it has full rights over those parts of the Northwest Passage that pass through its territory and that it can bar transit there. But this has been disputed by the US and the European Union. They argue that the new route should be an international strait that any vessel can use.”

This is scary. The Northwest passage opens and the greatest concern, by even our own government, appears to be navigation rights?

Something is terribly wrong when fire erupts in the attic, and the first thought is about roasting marsh-mellows, instead of reaching for the extinguisher or dialing 911. Heavens forbid the focus should shift, once and for all, on what we really need to be doing globally to close the passage, not make it wider.

Have we really become so incrementally desensitized to every-day catastrophes, that even the threat of looming irreversibility impacts behaviour, not at all?

I confess, I’m somewhat of a Type A personality meaning, among other things, my clocks are perfectly synchronized to internet time so after one pounce of the snooze button and exactly 9 minutes later, I can wake-up all over again just-in-time to hear the 680 News top-of-the-hour beep-tone reminding me it’s still only – but precisely – 5 a.m. and I can at least pretend I heard the news.

Okay fine! I confess again, I discovered long ago that if I only listen ’til 5:06, paying just enough attention to know the world didn’t end while I slumbered, it’s actually possible to hit the snooze-button six more times before I pay full attention to the 6 o’clock news and learn that Hell really has frozen-over, or at least Vancouver. That’s the bad news.

The good news, apparently, is how a few downed trees in Stanley Park has served as a ‘wakeup call’ to John Baird and the Harper government.

Rest easy, Mr. Gore, turns out we didn’t you to churn out millions of copies of An Inconvenient Truth pointing out the Larsen B ice-shelf or any one of the dozens of other environmental disasters, because now, according to John Baird, he has all the scientific proof he needed: “You know, in Ottawa … I haven’t taken my winter boots out this year, most days you don’t need a winter coat and that causes a huge amount of concern.”

Appears I’m not the only one who knows the inners workings of a snooze-button. The difference is, if I don’t get downstairs to my office and check my email until say 6:30, assuming it’s not a work in my jammies kind-of-day, the advice I give clients isn’t of global importance. At least it didn’t used to be. But Lord-love-a-duck, you mean to tell me all this time Stephen Harper has been doing the same thing, pouncing on a snooze button?

Don’t know about you, but I get all warm-and-fuzzy just knowing the people in power who three months ago said we could keep snoozing ’till 2050, or who earlier this week saw nothing alarming in announcing we’d be 50% worse than Kyoto by 2012, now say they hear this faint ringing sound and that “it isn’t just about communication.”

With all the scientific evidence previously laid out before Ms./Mr. Ambrose-Harper, the best  they could muster was the infamous Clean Air Act? Message to my good friend Garth Turner, the PMO did not ignore your 9 blogs dated July 30, August 28, August 29, September 27, September 28, October 10, October 11, October 13, and October 17, they were all just snoozing, except, of course, unless the call-display said “Charles McVety.“    

From Stockwell Day’s blog on December 1st:

“Hey who knows, maybe Al Gore is right.  Maybe all my constituents living high up on the West Bench, or Lakeview Heights, or the hills of Logan Lake will soon be sitting on lakeside property as one of the many benefits of global warming. All I know is last weekend when I got home from Ottawa there was more snow in my driveway than we usually get in a year. And I was begging for Big Al’s Glacial Melt when the mercury hit -24°. Do not despair, my fellow dwellers of the Okanagan and Nicola Valleys. If misery loves company then we had lots of it around our Province. Matter of fact, at one point in the week some 22 towns and cities had broken ALL-time records for paralyzing frigid temperatures.”

When I first read about Stockwell Day’s comments reported here, they seemed to me typical remarks of a Stephen Harper cabinet minister on the issue of global warming which is arguably among Canadian’s highest priorities.

The Harper game plan has so far been clear; the job of being serious-faced about doing nothing was assigned to the environment minister, and the job of making jokes about it, delegated to the Public Safety minister. Why stop there? Perhaps the Minister would like to joke about a See-Doo Day of fun-and-frolic on former Antarctic ice shelf, Larsen B.

The implied message being that until an event occurs inside Mr. Day’s riding of Okanagan-Coquihalla, the event hasn’t really happened or doesn’t need to be taken seriously. Wonder if the Minister for Public Safety thinks similarly about the Dawson College shootings? Those events must be bunk too until they happen within Mr. Day’s own constituency.

Personal note to Mr. Day, Mr. Harper et al, the part Al Gore has right is click here “If an issue is not on the tips of their constituents’ tongues, it’s easy for them to ignore it … to say, well, we’ll deal with that tomorrow.” 

Simply because “tomorrow” will occur on or before May 2007, in which Mr. Harper will, in an about-face, introduce the environmental plan for which he kicked Garth Turner out of caucus for trying to give the PM the heads-up on July 30, August 28, August 29, September 27, September 28, October 10, October 11, October 13, and October 17, and that Rona should have been permitted to introduce, the Hail Mary effort surely to-come will be woefully insufficient penance for gambling a chance on Canada’s environmental future.

Mr. Harper, for not listening, it may be your turn for the penalty box.

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17-DEC-2006 update @ 12:15 hrs: A close and wise person has furthered: “Mr. Day needs a lesson on the difference between Meteorology and Climatology.“