Harper Government #1 Environmental Priority - Get Reelected - Globe & Mail

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Ottawa — The Conservatives big election gimmick, the Five Priorities, have run out of steam. This morning, Stephen Harper revamped his cabinet to get ready for the Next Priorities. Priority One is winning an election. The key theme of Mr. Harper's shuffle was smoothing down rough edges, with the biggest being their miscue on the environment.

Rona Ambrose, the symbol of Conservative insensitivity to global warming, is demoted from Environment. Vic Toews, a social-conservative, law-and-order Justice Minister from rural Manitoba, has been moved to a policy-free portfolio in Treasury Board, to be replaced by middle-of-the-road, old blue Tory Rob Nicholson, from Ontario.

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At the top of the list was the Tories' tone-deafness on the environment, an issue that the Conservatives removed from the agenda just as it was rocketing up the charts of public concerns. Mr. Harper's plan was to divert attention away from climate change by placing emphasis on more visible problems, like smog, but it was botched. Thursday, Mr. Harper signalled that both clean air and climate change will be an “important priority going forward.” So the Prime Minister moved out Ms. Ambrose and moved in Mr. Baird, the cabinet's attack dog. Mr. Baird's job, it's clear, will be as much to attack the Liberal record as it is to present a Conservative program.

The fact that climate change is now being named as a priority is a sea-change that owes partly to the fact that new Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion plans to campaign heavily on the issue. But it is also a symbol of something else. Mr. Harper has recognized that the five priorities that every Tory repeated as a refrain for a year – a GST cut, an accountability act, a child-care benefit, safer streets, and a patient wait-times guarantee – need to be replaced with a new agenda for the next election, even if nothing was ever done about the wait-times guarantee.

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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070104.wshuff-analysis04/BNStory/Front