Canada’s new environment minister will be a former Greenpeace activist who was once arrested for scaling Toronto’s CN Tower during a 2001 protest, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced on Tuesday.

In a news release naming his new cabinet, Mr Trudeau named Steven Guibeault, a Quebec MP who had been serving as the Minister of Canadian Heritage since November 2019, as his new Minister of Environment and Climate Change.

Mr Guibeault, whose Laurier–Sainte-Marie district is located in downtown Montreal, has been a member of the House of Commons since October 2019.

A member of the Liberal Party, Mr Guibeault’s career before being elected to parliament included a decade with Greenpeace Canada, seven years of which were spent helming the group’s Quebec bureau.

In 2001, he was arrested and charged with mischief after climbing what was then the world’s tallest freestanding structure and unfurling a banner protesting Canada and then-US president George W Bush’s positions on the Kyoto climate protocol…read more.