As The Post's Alan Toulin reports today, the treaty the government of Canada intends to ratify is not the one to which the other 177 signatories agreed. The government's version of Kyoto gives Canada credit for reductions in CO2 emissions achieved in the United States, on the grounds that these were made possible by purchases of Canadian natural gas. This generous provision appears nowhere in the text distributed to other countries, for the very good reason that no other country has agreed to it.

So: You wanted Canada to sign on to the accord? You got it. You wanted a more relaxed, "made in Canada" approach? You got that, too. The important thing is that the government is ratifying the Kyoto agreement -- or rather, the Kyoto* agreement. No matter. It sounds the same either way.

But the contradictions in the federal position are as nothing compared to those of its critics. The provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan in particular, are suddenly greatly exercised at the "unilateral" imposition of federal legislation implementing the accord, notwithstanding the federal government's exclusive power to make international treaties under the Constitution. Foreign affairs may be federal, various provincial spokesmen fumed, but energy is provincial.

Funny, that. The provinces never seem to be so concerned about this overlap between federal and provincial powers when there's money involved. Agriculture, for example, is at least partly provincial. But when the issue was compensation for grain farmers sideswiped by the international subsidy war, the provinces were only too happy to cede jurisdictional ground to the feds. Indeed, Saskatchewan's Premier, Lorne Calvert, complained that the provinces were being dragged into a federal affair. "I am disappointed," he said at the time, "in the ... unwillingness of our national government to acknowledge its responsibility and jurisdiction respecting international trade." Ah well, it was a long time ago. June, to be precise.

But Kyoto's more ideological critics, in the business community and on the editorial boards, have achieved a new form of incoherence. If there's a contradiction between what the feds say and what they do, or between what the provinces said yesterday and what they say today, the contradiction in the conservative critique is internal and self- contained. By a strange contortion of rhetoric, it contradicts itself.

Consider: If there is one thing that opponents of the accord have stressed, it is the enormous cost to the Canadian economy, or at any rate Alberta's, of meeting the Kyoto target of a 6% reduction in emissions from 1990 levels over the next 10 years. Consumers will have to pay more to heat their homes, they warn, energy-intensive industries will contract, jobs will be lost. In short, the impact will be devastating, on a scale approaching a meteor strike. The agreement, said Alberta's Environment Minister, Lorne Taylor, in a typical flourish, sounds "the death knell for the Canadian economy." Uh, okay. So how much are we talking about, here? Care to put a dollar figure on all that devastation? What's a death knell go for these days, anyway? And this is where that strange disconnect occurs, between the critics' rhetoric and the facts -- the facts as they themselves would present them. A study for the Alberta government last February, for example, put the cost of ratification, once the treaty is fully implemented, at -- wait for it -- between $23-billion and $40-billion annually. Forty billion dollars! Kerrangg!

Er, wait a minute. This is a $1.1-trillion economy. In 10 years' time, it will probably be at least 50% larger. But even if it only grows by a third, that still puts it at roughly $1.5- trillion, without Kyoto. With Kyoto, it only grows to $1.46-trillion. That enormous, devastating, death-knell-sounding $40-billion, in other words, is essentially a rounding error, a paltry 2.6% of GDP, or about as much as the economy churns out every nine days. Instead of a 33% national pay raise, we'd have to settle for a lousy 30%. And that's the worst-case scenario. It's rather like that scene in Austin Powers, when Dr. Evil, just in from the 1960s and not caught up with changes in valuations since then, issues his ransom demand: One Million Dollars, or he destroys the Earth.

Mind you, he had a real "laser." The skeptics doubt whether global warming represents the same kind of planetary threat. Maybe they're right. Maybe 10 years from now, with the benefit of better science, we'll decide it was all a false alarm. On the other hand, maybe by then it will be clear that the threat is real. I'm not a betting man, but either way, it seems a small enough ante to keep us at the table.