OF ALL the days and of all the places to open an international conference on global warming, the world’s environmentalists could hardly have asked for a worse combination: today, in Montreal.

In a perfect storm of bad timing and even worse luck, nearly 200 nations gather in the Canadian city hoping to devise a successor to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.

There is just one problem: the Government which is hosting the UN conference — that of Paul Martin, the Liberal Prime Minister — and which has been the driving force behind efforts to build a new international consensus on global warming, is expected to fall in a no-confidence vote.

“It’s the nightmare scenario that environmental activists around the world have been hoping would be avoided,” said Elizabeth May, an executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada, an environmental lobby group.

Indeed, to the dismay of those hoping that today would bring a new dawn in the fight against global warming, there is every chance that Stephane Dion, the Canadian Environment Minister and conference chairman, will no longer be a minister in a Cabinet that no longer exists.

Mr Dion has spent the year travelling the world, trying to build international agreement on policies to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The fall of the Liberals today would trigger a general election in January. If the Liberals lose that, Mr Dion would probably be replaced as president of the UN conference for the rest of the year by a minister from the Conservative Party, which is critical of Kyoto.

The conference brings together 10,000 officials from the 189 countries which signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change at the 1992 Earth Summit in Brazil.

Among the delegations will be the 156 countries that signed Kyoto, which include every industrialised nation except the US and Australia.

The main goal of the meeting, which is expected to continue until December 9, was to map out a successor to Kyoto, with or without approval from the Bush Administration. Kyoto set a goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 7 per cent below 1990 levels and expires in 2012. But instead of setting an example of environmental leadership, Mr Martin and his Government will more likely be hitting the campaign trail for an election over Christmas and the New Year.

Canada’s three main opposition parties called the no-confidence vote last week to bring down Mr Martin’s Government, claiming that it no longer had the moral authority to govern after a series of corruption scandals. The Government looks set to lose the vote.

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