Opposition MPs and environment critics blasted Environment Minister Rona Ambrose for using her UN climate conference speech to conduct a partisan attack.

"It's inappropriate in an international meeting to slam another political party," Liberal environment critic John Godfrey told CTV Newsnet on Wednesday, adding no other environment minister did so.

"Secondly, she's wrong, that we didn't have a plan," he said.

Environment Minister Rona Ambrose blamed the previous Liberal government for leaving behind a mess in Canada during her Wednesday address to the UN climate change conference in Nairobi.

"When Canada's new government assumed power this year, we found an unacceptable situation," she said. "We found that measures to address climate change by previous Canadian governments were insufficient and unaccountable."

Ambrose told the delegates that Canada still had not implemented a domestic plan to address climate change when the Conservatives were elected into office.

The Liberals launched their $10-billion Project Green in April 2005, and had started to implement it when it was defeated, Godfrey said.

"We would have had -- had they not messed it up! -- things actually happening by 2008," he said.

"We had the EnerGuide program which had already retrofitted 70,000 houses; we had doubled the amount of wind power production in 2005."

Ambrose told delegates: "There are some who are using the Kyoto Protocol to create divisions within our country, but we will not let that happen."

NDP MP Nathan Cullen rejected that view.

"There is a real strange speech that the United Nations and the world saw today from Canada," he told Newsnet. "It described some mistruths, some half-truths and some deceptions. ... We know in talking to Canadians that they are fully behind any government that gets serious about climate change."

Cullen said Ambrose told the meeting that Canada has targets, but then didn't reveal she's using 2003 as a baseline.

"Every other single country in the room talks about 1990," he said. "Talking in half-truths is not what we expect from our government when it goes abroad."

Ambrose did not say in her speech that the Conservative government has said the Kyoto targets are unachievable. However, she did say: "Our plan also recognizes the need for urgent action so that we can finally make progress towards our 2012 international obligations."

Asked about that point later, Ambrose said: "It means the urgency to set in place our short-term targets which is why we are presently negotiating with industry sectors as we speak, to get those targets in place."

While Ambrose touted the Clean Air Act, all three opposition parties have said they won't support the bill in its current form.

The NDP arrived at a deal to send the bill to a committee for a rewrite before it went through second reading in Parliament -- a very unorthodox procedure.

An environmental rogue state?

"We're moving away from the international community and we're joining other environmental rogue states like the US, like Australia, who've decided this is someone else's problem," said Greenpeace Canada campaigner Steven Guilbeault.

UN officials say Canada, one of 163 countries that ratified the Kyoto Protocol, has not given formal word that it is disowning the accord.

However, CTV's Murray Oliver said in his talks with delegations, they no longer know if Canada supports the Kyoto treaty.

Although he didn't mention any country by name, outgoing UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called on voters to punish politicians who fail to fight for the environment.

"I think the population and the voters should take the lead to let them know they consider climate change seriously and that there may be a political cost," he said.

He painted the climate change issue as one of the world's most pressing problems.

"Climate change is not just an environmental issue, as too many people still believe. It is an all-encompassing threat," he said.

Under Kyoto, 35 countries plan to cut emissions of heat-trapping gases to five per cent below 1990 levels by 2008-12.

Canada's target is a six per cent cut, but emissions have risen by 27 per cent since the treaty was signed in 1997.

So far progress has been modest, with a chasm separating developed and developing countries.

Industrial countries such as Canada say the climate treaty won't work unless developing countries like China and India implement emissions-cutting commitments.

Poor countries, however, say they contributed very little to the rise in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide over the past century.

With a report from CTV's Murray Oliver and files from The Canadian Press