It is, woefully, no surprise whatsoever that Canada’s Conservative government is considering joining the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate. As the Globe and Mail reported today, anti-Environment Minister Rona Ambrose is cuddling up to the U.S. policy position, saying “I’ve been looking at the Asia-Pacific Partnership for a number of months now because the key principles around the Asia Pacific Partnership are very much in line with where our government wants to go.”

The “key principles” of the group currently known as the APP or the AP6 (U.S., Japan, China, India, South Korea, Australia) are that nothing that the group does is enforceable and no pesky environmental organizations are allowed to participate at the APP meetings (although any high-polluting industry representative is welcomed warmly). It’s ExxonMobile’s favourite climate change organization.

Ambrose went on to say that the joining the AP6 would “allow Canada to look at investments in cleaner technology here at home” – as if failing to join this gang of miscreants would somehow prevent the Tories from spending a penny on clean energy research.

So far, the Tories have promised to stay within the Kyoto Protocol group, but abrogate entirely Canada’s commitments under that protocol. As good as their word, they immediately withdrew funding for a host of climate change intiatives. Now Ambrose is promising to “out-perform the United States.”

It’s humiliating – and an eloquent condemnation of Jean Chretien and Paul Martin’s Liberals- that we are currently doing worse than the U.S. – which otherwise vies only with Australia as the world’s worst per capita contributor to climate change. But it’s terrifying to think that a federal minister would suggest that’s a worthy standard.