NEWS RELEASE

August 13, 2003                                                              For Immediate Release

BIGGEST BLACKHOLE BOONDOGGLE EVER IN CANADA

“How many more billions will Kyoto take?”

Yorkton - Garry Breitkreuz, federal Member of Parliament for Yorkton-Melville, predicted today that the price tag of implementing the Kyoto Protocol will make the Liberal government’s billion-dollar gun registry boondoggle look like loose change.

The Kyoto bureaucratic nightmare has already cost taxpayers two-billion dollars with no substantive environmental improvements.  Now Canadians have been handed another 1.25 billion-dollar bill to reduce 20 megatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) from Canada’s 240 megatonne (GHG) Kyoto commitment.  At this rate, taxpayers will be paying $62 million per megatonne, bringing Kyoto’s price tag to a whopping $15 billion.

What Canadians really need is a “Made-in Canada” solution to greenhouse gas reductions.  Since 1997, the Canadian Alliance has pressured this government to work with the provinces and industry sector to come up with a real plan to combat real environmental problems; not half-measured schemes that are doomed to fail.

“The Liberal government ratified the Kyoto Protocol eight months ago:  they had no plan then, and they have no plan now.  Recklessly throwing money at Kyoto, as demonstrated in yesterday’s announcement by the federal government, is a slap in the face to those Canadians suffering from an economic meltdown as a result of the BSE crisis,” declared Breitkreuz.

“The billion dollars spent to date on the federal gun registry fiasco has done nothing to prevent crime.  Now Canadians find themselves confronted with the biggest blackhole boondoggle yet – Kyoto!  This Liberal government is spending our money faster then we can make it.  When is this useless shopping spree going to end?” concluded Breitkreuz.

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