"I know the environment minister has been working on this file, has been developing plans, but to be quite blunt about it, I think we're pretty well starting from scratch," Harper told reporters outside the House of Commons.

"Under the (previous) government, we were going backwards. We were going away from the Kyoto targets," said the Conservative prime minister, whose election in January ended 12 years of Liberal Party rule.

"I don't think the previous government left us with a lot that we can really build on."

Earlier, Canada was flagged in a UN report on global warming as high on a list of countries that ratified the accord to most likely run into difficulty implementing its commitments.

In 2003, Canada had increased its emissions by 24.2 percent from the base 1990 level, far from its 2012 target of a six percent reduction, according to the report published in November 2005.

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