Kyoto an achievement as great as the CPR?

With the Kyoto Accord finally in effect, a Liberal Cabinet minister, those wonderful purveyors of the national conscience, was moved to compare its arrival with the Canadian Pacific Railway project. It apparently will be a project that will bind all Canadians. So typical of dysfunctional history illiterates. Today, anyone can make a historical parallel (Bush is Hitler) and claim it to be true. In today's post-modern relativism, how can one debunk this?

What a surveying project that linked the nation (British Columbia would only join Confederation on the condition that the railway be built) coast to coast has to do with a controversial accord that could cost this country millions (ironically in the West where the energy economy could be significantly negatively impacted) thus fragmenting it further is beyond me. The whole political and economic circumstances and dynamics surrounding the building of the CPR (including immigrant labourers meeting their deaths, negotiations with the Indians including Chief Crowfoot, American industrial magnates like Van Horne who took part and of course scandals not just with MacDonald's Conservatives but with the Liberals led by Mackenzie) is a legend in itself. A true Canadian saga.

It can be argued that without the CPR, there is no Canada. Without the Kyoto, on the other hand, we can all reclaim some sense of reality and still be a country. Seems to me that this minister is guilty of hyperbolic historical myth-making. I think it's safe to assume that Kyoto will not even come close to what the CPR meant and has meant in defining the Canadian identity.

*Meanwhile, two most successful scientific nations in the 20th century - The United States and Russia - much to the derision of people, oppose Kyoto. Hmmm.