By Margo McDiarmid for CBC News.

The man who negotiated Canada’s signature on the world’s first climate agreement nearly 20 years ago says the new Trudeau government needs to quickly prove to the world it takes the climate issue seriously and will do things differently than the former government.

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“Our government has been seen as kind of eccentric,” said Paul Heinbecker, who led the Canadian delegation to the Kyoto climate change negotiations in 1997. “But the world realizes it was a bit of aberration for Canada.”

We fell into endless discussions before. It was top down and no buy-in from the provinces.

Heinbecker was a career diplomat working for the governments of both Pierre Trudeau and Brian Mulroney before becoming the permanent representative of Canada to the UN.