OTTAWA—The Liberal leadership race has taken a more combative turn, with contender Marc Garneau openly calling out front-runner Justin Trudeau to deliver more than empty rhetoric.

“He has told Canadians that we need a ‘bold’ plan and a ‘clear vision’ without defining either,” Garneau, a Montreal MP and Canada’s first man in space, said in a sharply worded news release on Wednesday.

“On Justin’s two clear priorities, the middle class and youth engagement, he has said nothing. Therein lies the fundamental difference between Justin Trudeau and myself.”

Garneau, in an interview on Wednesday, said he very deliberately made the decision to go beyond merely “telegraphing” his criticism to stating it more bluntly this week. “It was time. There’s only two months left to the (April 14) leadership convention.”

He also said he’s not the only Liberal voicing this criticism, and that it comes up repeatedly when he’s speaking to partisans frustrated with the lack of substance coming from the Trudeau campaign. Garneau has been touring southern Ontario in the past week.

“I hear people say, ‘It’s all very sort of reassuring bromides but where does Mr. Trudeau stand’?”

Garneau’s challenge sets the stage for a more adversarial encounter on Saturday when the Liberal leadership rivals face off in Mississauga for their third debate.

“I promise you, it probably will,” Garneau said, when asked if viewers would see something more interesting than the past two, kid-glove affairs.

Up until now, Trudeau’s rivals, including Garneau, have not used his name when taking subtle shots at him.

Trudeau has made no apologies for failing to put out a detailed policy platform in the race.

Just last week, he told a student crowd at Western University that this lack of a platform was actually what distinguished him from the other eight candidates in the Liberal leadership race.

“I’m actually frustrating both media pundits and a lot of others,” Trudeau acknowledged, arguing that while he had been making clear statements on everything from pipelines to the legalization of marijuana, he wasn’t putting out a platform.

“And that’s because the Liberal party has gotten far too much in the habit of generating a platform by the leader and some very smart people around them, that they then turn to Liberals across the country and say, ‘Now go and sell this door to door,’ ” he said.

“This leadership is the beginning of a platform-development process, not the end of it.”

Trudeau is telling his audiences that the Liberals have bigger problems than policy generation right now.

“Now is not the time to short-cut this. My emphasis right now, rather than being on policy development, like most of my colleagues, is on organization. It is on building the capacity to be relevant in every single riding across the country, folding people back not just into the Liberal party, but actually into the political process.”

Garneau’s statement likened this approach to blind purchases.

“That is like asking Canadians to buy a new car without first test-driving it,” he said.

Garneau said someone who has sat in Parliament since 2008 — including as a critic for youth and multiculturalism — should have more to say about issues such as youth unemployment, for instance.

“You can’t just keep saying, ‘I want to consult,’ ” Garneau said.

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In Winnipeg a couple of weeks ago, leadership contender Deborah Coyne made a similar, yet veiled shot, warning Liberals that they weren’t buying a “product.” And candidate Martha Hall Findlay has also been arguing that she is providing specifics in her campaign that others — Trudeau, she hints — are not providing.

Garneau also warned Liberals that they have placed too much faith in leaders and personalities before.

“Too often in the recent past we have put our faith as a party in one individual without asking the tough questions: Where do we stand? What is our vision for Canada?” Garneau’s statement said. “Now is the time to get it right. In this race, we must know what it is we’re voting for, not just who we’re voting for.”

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