Stephen Harper made the following dismissive remark during his press conference yesterday:

Canada's Clean Air Act wasn't developed on the fly at a press conference. It wasn't written at an international meeting held in an exotic location. And we're certainly not going to hire a comedian to promote it.

There are a lot of things wrong with this remark -- like, why is Harper opposed to international treaties? -- but let me focus on the jab at Rick Mercer and the One Tonne Challenge.

There are four general ways that I can think of for reducing pollutants of any kind...

One way is through legislation and regulation that bans or caps emissions. A second way is through economic measures, such as taxes on pollution, that drive people to find alternatives. A third way is in subsidizing alternative, cleaner technologies. The fourth way is to encourage consumers to intentionally choose cleaner alternatives because it's the right thing to do.

The fourth one actually sounds like something this band of conservatives would be attracted to. Personal responsibility and all that. But, unless their desired version of this approach would be to just sit back and see if enough people spontaneously cut their emissions, they would have to get involved in little things like "marketing" and "communications".

Well, I don't think Harper's point was that hiring a comedian was dissonant with the objectives of this particular marketing strategy. Rather, he was just trying to score cheap political points and couldn't help sneering while doing so.

Personally, I'm more of a fan of the second approach -- taxes on polluters -- but a marketing-based approach is probably likely to generate some inexpensive results and I cannot fault the choice of Rick Mercer for this particular campaign.

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