OTTAWA—Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s defiant views on democracy and the environment have exploded together in one Parliament Hill uproar, as unelected Conservative senators killed a climate-change bill passed by a majority of elected MPs in the Commons.

It is the second time in two weeks that Harper has chosen to do an end run around the Commons, his opponents say, after his announcement last week that there would be no chance for MPs to vote on his announced extension of Canada’s troop commitment in Afghanistan.

Additionally, the death of the climate-change bill means that Canada will arrive emptyhanded at an international conference next month in Cancun, where nearly 200 countries will be trying to hammer out an agreement on climate change.

The bill was killed without debate — the first time in at least 70 years that the Senate has killed legislation from the Commons without a hearing, according to parliamentary experts.

“What he’s done is morally wrong,” an outraged New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton told reporters in the Senate foyer. “This is one of the most undemocratic acts we have seen in the Parliament of Canada . . . This Senate should be abolished. It should be ashamed of itself.”

Unrepentant, Harper told the Commons on Wednesday that Bill C-311, supported in the Commons by the Liberals, New Democrats and Bloc Québécois, was “a completely irresponsible bill.”

“It sets irresponsible targets, does not lay out any measure of achieving them, other than by shutting down sections of the Canadian economy and throwing hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of people out of work,” Harper said.

His government has said it would prefer to work out its climate-change plan in concert with the United States.

So although Harper has campaigned fiercely in the past against the unelected Senate thwarting the elected Commons, his appointed Conservative senators did just that on Tuesday evening.

Harper’s critics were repeatedly reminding him on Wednesday of his own, past views about how the elected Commons should always prevail over the unelected Senate. The Prime Minister made these remarks, however, when the Senate was controlled by Liberals.

He has since appointed enough of his own party loyalists — 35 since July 2007 — to win votes in the Upper House. Harper and his Senate leader, Marjory LeBreton, were referring to C-311 on Wednesday as a “coalition bill” — an attempt to cast it as a Liberal-NDP-Bloc conspiracy.

Liberals in the Upper House were caught off guard by the snap vote in the Senate late Tuesday, and not enough showed up to save the bill from losing, by a margin of 43-32.

Liberals said Wednesday that Conservatives pulled the surprise vote deliberately to free the Harper government as it heads to the Cancun conference.

Liberal environment critic Gerard Kennedy said Tuesday’s development was no accident, coming from a government that now only has a part-time environment minister after the unexpected resignation of Jim Prentice earlier this month. Government House Leader John Baird has taken on the environment portfolio for the time being, and he’ll be representing Canada at Cancun.

“A part-time minister, two weeks ahead of Cancun and no plan whatsoever on the part of our government and presumably our delegation is going to go there without instructions,” Kennedy said. He noted as well that Canada’s spotty record on climate change might have also helped kill its bid to win a seat on the United Nations Security Council this fall.

Layton agreed that the Conservative Senate has cast a shadow over Canada’s international reputation. “The government has no plan going into a conference on the future of the climate-change crisis in this country,” Layton said.

“Canada will be one of the few, probably the only country, who has absolutely nothing. The only thing we had going for us was that the House of Commons had adopted the targets established by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning scientists of the United Nations, who represent the best thinking globally.”

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The bill — the Climate Change Accountability Act — had spent the last year or so bouncing between the House of Commons and its environment committee.

The Commons passed the bill in May and it went to the Senate for final approval.

The legislation calls for greenhouse gases to be cut 25 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020.

That’s more stringent than the Harper government’s goal of a 17 per cent emissions cut from 2005 levels by 2020, which is in line with the Obama administration’s targets in the United States.

Environmentalists decried the bill’s defeat.

“Using an undemocratic, 19th-century institution to avoid dealing with the 21st century’s most pressing environmental problem is both hypocritical and irresponsible,” said Keith Stewart of Greenpeace Canada.

Graham Saul of the Climate Action Network Canada said in a statement: “As we head into the UN climate talks in Cancun later this month, it is unacceptable that Canada’s only climate-change legislation has been defeated after years of majority support from our elected members of Parliament and their constituents.”

A blog posting by Clare Demerse of the Pembina Institute, a non-partisan think tank, took issue with the way the bill was killed.

“It would have been difficult to watch the Senate defeat this groundbreaking legislation under any circumstances. But to see it lost in this way is even tougher: C-311 was defeated without any debate, without the chance to call a single witness to explain what it offered, and at a moment when key supporters of the bill happened to be away from the Senate.

“I think that Canadians deserved better,” the blog post read.

With files from The Canadian Press

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