Other politicians have seized on weekend remarks by Green Party Leader Elizabeth May comparing the Conservatives' climate policies to appeasement of the Nazis by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.

"It is time for the Liberal members opposite to stand up against outrageous, hateful, mean-spirited comments by their candidate in Central Nova," Environment Minister John Baird said in Tuesday's question period.

"It is inexplicable how they could not stand up against people who bash Christians and invoke Nazi-era atrocities."

May isn't running as a Liberal in the Nova Scotia riding, but the Liberals won't be running a candidate against her. She has praised Liberal Leader Stephane Dion's environmental philosophy and policies.

Dion, who won't face a Green candidate in his Montreal riding, said May should withdraw the comment.

"We should not use it -- for the very reason that in the spectrum of power, the Nazi regime is beyond any comparison," Dion said outside the Commons.

"So I'm uncomfortable with the reference to Chamberlain about anything else than what happened in the Second World War."

NDP Leader Jack Layton, whose party has only a narrow lead over the Greens for third place in public support, also said the comments were something his party didn't consider to be either wise or appropriate.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper cited a letter of complaint from the Canadian Jewish Congress.

"Whatever the Earth is doing, warming up, it has nothing to do with what the Nazis did to the Jews of Europe," said Congress spokesperson Ed Morgan.

However, two public figures in Britain have used a similar analogy on the climate issue.

Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett said last week that climate change should be thought of as "climate security" and compared the pre-Second World War actions of Winston Churchill with those of Chamberlain, who history sees as having been a Nazi appeaser.

"It was a time when Churchill, perceiving the dangers that lay ahead, struggled to mobilize the political will and industrial energy of the British Empire to meet those dangers," she said. "He did so often in the face of strong opposition and not always with success."

On Tuesday, Prince Charles made the point in a speech to a business conference that "I do not want my children and grandchildren, or anyone for that matter, saying to me, 'Why didn't you do something when it was possible to make a difference and when you knew what was happening?'"

May's position

May has said she considers her weekend remarks misrepresented and that the Conservatives are only trying to deflect attention away from their climate change policy.

"Mr. Harper and Mr. Baird are desperate to deflect attention from their own vile, despicable, reckless behaviour," she told CTV News by phone.

She added: "What I said is that in the eyes of the World, Canada is attracting unprecedented criticism."

May earlier told The Canadian Press that she was simply repeating the comments of British journalist and environmental author George Monbiot.

The author of Heat: How To Stop the Planet from Burning reportedly told a conference in Toronto on Saturday that there's a new climate change "axis of evil" -- U.S. President George Bush, Australian Prime Minister John Howard and Harper, she said.

The Conservatives have abandoned trying to reach Canada's Kyoto target of a six per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels by 2012. The U.S. and Australia signed but never ratified the treaty.

The three countries are the world's top per capita producers of GHG emissions, eclipsed only by Luxembourg.

May, who claims to have taken notes, said Monbiot called the three "more culpable in the eyes of history than Neville Chamberlain's attempt to appease the Nazis."

Monbiot made a similar analogy on the climate change issue in a 1995 column for The Guardian, a British newspaper.

May made her statements while speaking to a church congregation in London, Ont.

Monbiot was comparing the moral failure of those who don't want to meet the Kyoto Protocol with Chamberlain's failure to appreciate the risks posed by Adolf Hitler's Germany in the late 1930s, she said.

"We run the risk of losing civilization," May told CP.

Dion said climate change is indeed a threat to global security, on the same scale as terrorism or nuclear weapons.

"All these threats are worrying enough," he said. "You don't need to go over the top."

With files from The Canadian Press