There appears to be a rash of forgetfulness breaking out in the Canadian Conservative Party as Tories from the top down begin acknowledging (or stop denying) the truth of climate change.

The most important example is that of Prime Minister Stephen Harper himself. Harper is not just acknowledging climate change as a serious issue (as we reported on Wednesday), now he’s trying to say that this has been his position all along. Harper told CBC‘s Don Newman this week:

“I think my criticism was principally that the (Kyoto climate-change accord) targets were unreachable, Canada had taken on the most onerous targets in the world; I saw no evidence that there was a plan to meet them. … If anything in the last four or five years, the evidence has strengthened that we have to take real and substantive action.”

He did not go on to explain how that can be reconciled with his previous comments (eg., “The science is still evolving” or “It’s a scientific hypothesis, a controversial one….”) or with his ongoing policy of cutting all climate change remediation efforts from Canadian government spending.

The other current instance of revisionism comes from Public Safety Minister and creationist Stockwell Day, who deleted from his website some embarrassing musings about climate change that he had posted earlier this month.

This is incredibly encouraging. It now appears that both leading Canadian political parties are repudiating their previous shameful performances in addressing this issue. Let’s just hope that one of the two has the courage and the political support to begin implementing sensible climate change policy in 2007.