Canada's new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau vowed Wednesday to take strong measures on climate change ahead of Paris climate talks in December, after nearly two decades of foot-dragging on carbon emissions.

"Canadians expect their government to be responsible around climate change and addressing the impacts of the environment that we're facing around the world right now," Trudeau said during his first press conference as the nation's leader.

"Canada is going to be a strong and positive actor on the world stage," he said, including in Paris at COP21 -- the 21st so-called Conference of Parties held since 1992 to try to find a way to collectively cut global carbon emissions.

Trudeau said his government "with the provinces and municipalities and countries around the world (will) demonstrate that Canada is doing its part to address climate change impacts."

But he has yet to announce a new target for reducing emissions.

Steering those efforts will be Canada's first environment and climate change minister, Catherine McKenna, an international trade lawyer who once provided legal advice to the United Nations peacekeeping mission in East Timor.

The previous Tory administration had said it would seek to reduce Canada's carbon emissions by 30 percent from 2005 levels by 2030, after admitting it would miss an earlier, less ambitious goal.

It was panned by environmental activists as the weakest of any industrialized nation ahead of the Paris summit.

Canada had agreed to much deeper cuts in CO2 emissions under the Kyoto Protocol, before it withdrew from the landmark 1997 treaty on global warming in 2011.

The nation emits less than two percent of the world's total greenhouse gases, but its per capita emissions are among the highest in the world.