Once again the hewers of wheat and drawers of oil are coming to town to tell us what's good for us.

Previously, they've come during elections, urging us to support political parties founded on the promise to repress our interests in favour of theirs.

This time they want us to rise up against ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty that couldn't be more attractive if it were written specifically to boost the competitive advantage of Southern Ontario.

Do they think we're stupid?

Well, okay: That's usually a safe bet.

But even the dunderheads at Toronto City Council don't need much of an environmental conscience to know that Kyoto would be good for us.

Council supported ratification last spring without a word of debate and with only a handful of members dissenting.

Nationally, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities took the same position and has played a lead role in the effort to promote Kyoto -- once again motivated by advantage as much as conscience. Unlike the broad public, whose strong Kyoto support the oil diggers consider ignorant, the cities have a vested interest.

Urban populations will find it easier to comply with Kyoto, and the advantages of doing so will accrue disproportionately within city limits.

The FCM supports Kyoto on condition that "no region of the country bears an unreasonable cost related to reducing greenhouse gas emissions," but that is a fantasy.

It's like calling for the abolition of private cars so long as no autoworkers are affected. The oil diggers would hurt.

But we're on the lucky side of the equation. Long before anyone heard of Kyoto, devising clever ways to avoid sending dollars to Alberta was good business in these parts.

That's why we rely more on uranium than gas to produce electricity; perhaps more virtuously, it also explains why industry and commercial landlords spend billions on conservation.

Instead of shipping dollars to Fort McMurray to buy fuel, they prefer to spend them in Mississauga, where skilled workers design and manufacture high-efficiency windows and ventilation systems.

The business is huge: Simply replacing inefficient light bulbs in one downtown office tower will save enough electricity every year to power an entire city of 9,000 people, according to the local conservation industry.

For our energy-dependent manufacturing region, replacing imported oil sets purely virtuous circles in motion, and any policies that create new incentives to replace more oil can only help.

The oil diggers might concede the point without abandoning their key claim: that the overall costs of compliance would still be too high.

But just as the advantages of compliance flow disproportionately our way, the costs will be easier to absorb.

Say the cost of Kyoto compliance is a new tax on the use of carbon fuels. Every farmer in Canada might go broke (wouldn't want that), but the urbanite -- especially the hundreds of thousands of subway-commuting apartment and townhouse dwellers in big cities -- might hardly notice. Where one Canadian faces fundamental life choices, a Torontonian shrugs, deciding to ditch the ranch house in favour of a condo, or deciding to buy a Metropass instead of a second family car, a choice eased considerably by the fact that transit service has improved dramatically due to the new investment made possible by the carbon tax.

The more urban the region, the more choices it would offer enterprising carbon-tax avoiders. Big landlords would take advantage of district heating and cooling systems while industry exploited all sorts of clever co-generation schemes.

Toronto has already won international plaudits as a Kyoto-friendly city by virtue of two dead-simple, private-sector operations that suck gas out of local landfills, turning it into electricity and keeping all the dollars at home.

Too bad for Alberta, but not for us.
jbarber@globeandmail.ca