After the brief but impressive performance of COP President Stéphane Dion, participants left Montreal with great hopes for Canada’s year in the Presidency. Under Dion’s leadership, the COP agreed to move ahead in Montreal despite resistance from the US. Canada went from zero to hero in just two weeks.

With Canada finally getting on track to meet its Kyoto Protocol commitments, the President would finally have been in a position to ask more from other countries without embarrassment. But then, after a change in government and a new Environment Minister, Rona became COP President. It took her two months to take Canada from hero to zero.

She started her tenure as Environment Minister on the domestic front by overseeing her government’s gutting of most of the Kyoto implementation programmes that had been put in the place by previous governments.

To be fair to Rona, she was just taking the lead from the new Prime Minister, who said soon after taking office said: “I have said all along that Canada would not achieve the Kyoto targets. Canada could not achieve them, and that’s just the reality, but we do want to make progress.” Eventually. By 2050.

Prime Minister Harper’s contempt for climate protection is not just demonstrated by domestic inaction, he is quick to denigrate international policy making. Just a couple of weeks ago in defending his long awaited but soon discredited “green plan” he said: “Canada’s Clean Air Act wasn’t written at an international meeting being held in an exotic location.”

In trying to put a positive spin on the contempt that her government has for the UN multilateral process, Rona said: “Let’s be clear, we’re in the Kyoto Protocol, we’re working with our United Nations partners.”

But not apparently that often – or that closely…Since assuming the presidency, Rona found time away from her hairdresser to show up for about 24 hours in Bonn in May this year for the SB24 meeting, but not enough for the pre-COP 12 meeting in Geneva or the G8+5 meeting in Mexico, where she just sent staff to meet with the many ministers.

We were however impressed with the hair. Good hair, some might say even exceptional hair.