Some participants at a climate change symposium in Iqaluit this week say leaders in Canada's North are being hypocritical by rejecting a proposed carbon tax, given that northerners have called on the rest of the world to cut their greenhouse gas emissions.

Delegates at the symposium Monday said that if anyone should be supporting federal Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion's proposal for a national carbon tax, it should be Inuit and other northerners who are worried about a warming Arctic climate.

But last month, the premiers of Nunavut, the Northwest Territories and the Yukon said Dion's carbon tax would unfairly add to the already high costs of energy in the North.

"I'm puzzled by your stand on carbon taxes. It makes no sense to me, and as somebody from the south, I feel betrayed," Nola-Kate Seymoar, executive director of the International Centre for Sustainable Cities in Vancouver, said Monday at the symposium.

Dion's $15.4 billion-a-year Green Shift tax plan would raise costs on fossil fuels such as coal, oil and diesel. But those costs would be offset by broad-based personal and corporate tax cuts.

The plan would initially peg the price of emissions from fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas at $10 per tonne of carbon dioxide, rising to $40 per tonne in the fourth year.

Instead of a carbon tax, the northern premiers called for investment in alternative energy sources, including hydroelectricity, to move remote northern communities away from diesel-generated energy.

Seymoar said the proposed carbon tax is not perfect, but it would force individuals and governments to change their behaviours to reduce greenhouse gases faster than any other solution.

Her remarks came as several Inuit elders shared their concerns about the effects of a warming climate, such as the arrival of new insects to the region and changes to Arctic ice.

Such concerns from the Arctic, which often fuel a global call to slow down climate change, are why Seymoar said the northern leaders hold such a contradictory position on the carbon tax proposal.

"A lot of southerners are really supporting the North and saying, 'We want to change, we want to stop climate change and we've listened,'" she said.

"I think we have to work out the ramifications so that we're in this together."

Nick Illauq of Clyde River, Nunavut, told symposium delegates that northern politicians see the short-term negative impacts of a carbon tax, but are not thinking ahead.

"I don't want to give my grandchildren a hard time trying to survive in this new world that we're going to face in the future," said Illauq, the research coordinator with the Ittaq Heritage and Research Centre.

Illauq said he supports a carbon tax, adding that he believes many young northerners would as well.

The Planning for Climate Change Symposium, organized by the City of Iqaluit and the Canadian Institute of Planners, began Sunday and runs through Wednesday.

LIKE IT?  LET OTHERS KNOW