I’m no fan of strategic voting. Fewer things are more distasteful than voting for someone you don’t like to keep someone you can’t stand from being elected. But there are certain times, such as when an enthusiastically self-confessed right wing ideologue is running your country like it’s a conservative think tank’s toy model, that you have to vote up the middle. Thus I am by necessity the biggest Stephane Dion supporter on my block. Thus I am glad that, well, Dion seems all right, as Stephane Dions go.

He was just in Alberta, delivering his environmental policies personally to the good people there. He’s acting as though he’s all ready Prime Minister, which may be just the right way to act. And frankly, I like it.

The environmental policy he is describing would be, if substantive portions of it actually made into law, the first major Canadian federal environmental initiative of my generation. Up till now the environmental issues have mostly been fought out at the provincial level and below, while at the national level I think we still don’t have a Environmental Bill of Right, decades later. Dion claims he would start with transformative taxation, including penalties for abusive greenhouse gas emissions and wasteful water use. He’s not hiding that the Alberta oil patch is the intended target for transformation, in fact he’s telling anyone that will listen. Academic Quebecois liberal green federalist Stephane even had the nerve to be interviewed on the subject by the anti-intellectual regionalist capitalist Calgary Sun.

Here’s what the Sun had to say about him and his policies:

Dion attacks his subject with a disciplined logic honed by an education with Jesuit priests and Parisian intellectuals.

The uncontrolled development in the oilsands is “anarchic” and “bad for the environment and the economy” — a view at odds with the hands-off-the-market approach of Premier Ed Stelmach, elected leader of his party the same day as Dion.

….

Dion sees the fact there are zero Liberal MPs in Alberta as “a sad situation” and insists such arithmetic can change.

Somehow you get the idea the man just doesn’t comprehend how deep the fear and fury runs in this province’s political soil where right-wing MPs — even idiots — routinely win by landslides and all contrary opinions — even smart ones — are seen as treasonous.

And this unquestioned hatred of Liberals existed many years before the National Energy Program or Trudeau.

That’s easily the nicest thing an Albertan paper has ever said about an eastern environmentalist. Even if they didn’t allow him an accent for his name (neither do I, but hey, I’m not a newspaper and accents are a pain on a US-layout keyboard).

He’s also calling for global carbon credit trading which is, um, interesting. One hopes he knows enough about pollution credit trading schemes that if did do it he would do it right and not wrong. Both are clearly options.

Transformative taxes, carbon trading and a crackdown on the “anarchic” environmental abuses of the oil patch. This kind of environmentalism is new on the Canadian federal stage. Let’s hope it finds purchase in that silty soil.