We'd missed this nearly month-old story
'Canada Takes On The Yes Men After Copenhagen Prank, Fails Miserably':
"Back during the Copenhagen Climate Conference in December, the [Yes Men] teamed up with anonymous Canadian activists and used press releases and fake websites to announce that Canada would adopt science-based emission targets – reducing emissions by 40% over 1990 levels by 2020 and 80% by 2050. The news received enormous media attention across Canada and, according to The Greener Pages, caused at least two embarrassing media moments for Canadian high officials. In response, the government strong armed an ISP into taking down the two fake sites — and simultaneously knocking out 4500 others in the process." [From Ecorazzi, who point to original]:
"The government of Canada has used strong-arm tactics to shut down two parody websites criticizing Canada's poor environmental policy, taking down 4500 other websites in the process...The two websites, "enviro-canada.ca" and "ec-gc.ca", are "directly connected to a hoax which misleads people into believing that the Government of Canada will take certain actions in relation to environmental matters," wrote Mike Landreville from Environment Canada in an email to the German Internet Service Provider (ISP) Serverloft. "We trust you appreciate the importance of avoiding confusion among the public concerning Canadian governmental affairs and that you will assist us in preventing this hoax from spreading further." In a remarkable overstepping of bounds, Landreville also asked the ISP to "make every effort to prevent any further attempts concerning other environment-related domains (enviro, ec-gc, etc.) originating from your servers..."Surely the Canadian government has better things to do than shut down thousands of websites, beg the US for photo ops, and berate NGOs for things they haven't done," said Andy Bichlbaum of The Yes Men. "They could instead figure out reasonable ways of responding to their growing legion of critics."" [GreenPages]
Perhaps, for propaganda and PR-watchers, the most interesting element of the report:
"Canada had prepared for just such an eventuality by creating a so-called "Climate Change War Room," a special office tasked with delivering rapid-response messaging to any negative media coverage around Canada's role at the Copenhagen climate change negotiations. Despite these efforts, last week's flurry of parody announcements, which the prime minister's office called a "childish prank," received enormous media attention across Canada and caused at least two embarrassing media moments for Canadian high officials.