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That leaves the NDP and the Greens. Like the Conservatives, the NDP has yet to release a climate change plan: it campaigned for a national cap-and-trade system during the last election, but that was under Tom Mulcair, so presumably is no longer operative. Like the Liberals, the Greens would implement a carbon tax (with offsetting “dividends”). And like both the Conservatives and the Liberals, both would keep all manner of costly and inefficient existing programs in place, while adding still more costly and inefficient programs on top.

The difference is that unlike the Liberals or the Conservatives neither is in any danger of being elected. So whereas the Liberals are careful to hide the costs of their plan or defer them until after the election, their cousins on the left seem unfamiliar with the whole concept of cost. The NDP has endorsed a UN call for reductions of 45 per cent from 2010 levels by 2030, while the Greens have called for cuts of 40 per cent from 2005 levels by 2025, and to 80 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050 — targets that are not only far beyond the Paris commitments we are nowhere near attaining, but unattainable.

Photo by Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press

That contrasts with Conservatives, who are obsessed with the costs of the tax, to the exclusion, not only of the offsetting rebates available under both federal and provincial versions, but increasingly of any sense of reality. Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s claim last week that the federal carbon tax would cause a recession had seemed to set the standard — Environment Canada projections put the net cost to the economy by 2022 at just 0.1 per cent of GDP — until this week’s outburst from an Alberta Conservative to the effect that the province’s carbon tax was costing her church $50,000 a year: an estimate that, as one economist put it, would represent the energy consumption of “five or six Notre Dame cathedrals.”