As Canada drags its feet towards the G8 summit and Stephen Harper takes his place as George Bush’s faithful hound by lobbying for “intensity” targets and special provisions for energy producers, a new allegiance with the emergent CO2 super-emitter, China, has gone largely unnoticed.

A recent Globe story frames the debate surrounding Chinese coal-mining in B.C. as a labour issue—the Chinese coal company claims it needs to bring in Chinese miners because Canada doesn’t have enough experienced miners for the job.

Let’s leave aside the preposterousness of the notion that the Chinese have any claim on superior expertise when it comes to coal-mining, the fact that miners die by the thousands each year in China, and that Chinese mines are perhaps the most dangerous in the world. Let’s just pause to ask whether Canada should be bending labour and immigration laws in order to make it a little easier for China to burn coal.

We can’t blame China for all the coal being burnt in the world. Our allies in climate-change prevarication, Australia and the US, are addicted to the stuff as well. But the fact is that we’re going to need to leave our coal in the ground if we expect to keep the climate relatively stable. Burning coal accounts for about a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Why on earth would we go out of our way to expedite its passage to the world’s power plants?

Probably for the same reason we’re feverishly ramping up tar sands production to the point where this alone may be what keeps us from meeting Kyoto requirements. If we’re interested in producing oil that is so CO2-intensive that each barrel creates the environmental effect of four cars driving for a day, then perhaps it is not surprising that we are greasing the skids for more coal-mining.

But let’s be clear about what we’re getting into. We’re already hand-in-hand with the Kyoto-bashing Bush administration, and we’ve already muddied out international reputation by fighting against any real emissions targets. Now we’re going to bat for the world’s leading emitter, whose planning chief, Ma Kai, calls the idea that China should cut its emissions in order to fight climate change “unfair and unacceptable.” If that sounds like Harper’s position on hard caps, that should tell us exactly where this policy is taking us.