Mark Cameron is executive director of Canadians for Clean Prosperity, and a former policy adviser to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Prime-minister-designate Justin Trudeau and his team could be forgiven for wanting a break after the long federal election campaign, but that is a luxury they will not have.

Within 40 days, the new prime minister and the premiers will face the challenge of presenting Canada’s action plan on climate change at the COP 21 United Nations conference on climate change in Paris. Furthermore, the Liberal platform calls for a federal-provincial meeting within 90 days to develop a new climate framework and emissions targets – an ambitious agenda, to say the least. Under the outgoing Conservative government, Canada was on track to miss its Copenhagen climate targets of 17-per-cent reduction below 2005 levels by 2020, just as the previous Liberal governments failed to meet our Kyoto targets.

Setting impressive targets and failing to meet them has become an unfortunate Canadian tradition. As Mr. Trudeau himself has said,

“What we need is not ambitious political targets. What we need is an ambitious plan to reduce our emissions in the country.”