While Alberta Premier Ralph Klein v. Prime Minister Jean Chrétien may be the main bout in the Kyoto boxing ring, equally interesting are the associated scraps pitting pollster against pollster, advertising campaign against advertising campaign.

Every evening, television viewers in Ontario are subjected many times to two actors, in some ads a sincere-looking woman and in alternating ads a sincere-looking man, walking across their screens criticizing the federal government's rush to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

"We deserve a Canadian approach," the woman purrs, "that produces immediate results and invests in our environmental future -- a Canadian plan that reduces emissions without costing jobs, damaging our economy or our standard of living."

Her seductive message is paid for by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives and the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters Association under an umbrella called the Canadian Coalition for Responsible Environmental Solutions. Prime-time ads are expensive, so the coalition is saturating the airwaves only in Ontario.

There is only one problem: The cost-free solution to greenhouse-gas emissions doesn't exist. And the sponsors have come up with very few proposals.

A pro-Kyoto group assembled by the Sierra Club of Canada has responded with full-page newspaper ads (which cost a fraction of television campaigns). This group challenges the reader to name 10 prominent Canadians who are against Kyoto: "You can't, can you? Nobody can." The ad is signed by more than 100 prominent Canadians.

The roots of the coalition's appeal to Canadian chauvinism lie in the obscurity of Kyoto. Why should we subject ourselves to some foreign deal struck an ocean away when the alternative is a good old homegrown alternative? This is a no-brainer even for the people who think the Kyoto accord is a competitor to the Honda Accord.

If only life and international agreements were so simple.

The treatment of the made-in-Canada solution has led to the battle of the pollsters. Readers of this newspaper, for instance, have been treated to a spirited debate between Darrell Bricker, who heads the public-affairs division of Ipsos-Reid (which did a recent poll for the Alberta government and also polls for The Globe and Mail and CTV), and Frank Graves, president of Ekos Research Associates, who is doing tracking polling on Kyoto for the Department of the Environment.

At the core of this debate is how much the respondents' answers change when instead of being asked a straight approve-disapprove question about ratifying the treaty, the pollster inserts a made-in-Canada alternative as an option.

On the first query, support for ratification is high all across the country except in Alberta: Ekos's number is consistently in the high 70s, which is very similar to the results Environics got in a recent poll done for the Council of Canadian Unity.

But with made-in-Canada versus Kyoto-ratification in the questionnaire, respondents are evenly divided at 45 per cent, and 10 per cent undecided. Mr. Bricker argues the made-in-Canada solution is part of the continuing debate and deserves to be tested. But the differing results do not mean support is dropping or opposition increasing because the questions are measuring different things. Indeed, there is a phony distinction because any plan to limit greenhouse gases will be made in Canada. All Kyoto does is set targets.

For what it is worth, Mr. Graves's nightly tracking indicates no change in Kyoto support since the beginning of the coalition's earnest-lady television blitz. But it is too early to determine whether the petroleum producers and their partners are wasting their money.