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Small beer, say the Greens, who had earlier unveiled their own 20-point climate action plan. Calling climate change “the gravest security threat the world has ever seen,” it calls for emissions to be reduced by fully 60 per cent by 2030, with a further target of zero emissions by 2050.

To achieve this, it calls for the creation of an all-party “war cabinet,” which would impose such measures as a ban on fracking, an end to foreign oil imports, and the replacement of all internal-combustion vehicles (not just new ones) with electric by 2040.

To put this in context, all of the existing federal and provincial programs combined had succeeded in reducing Canada’s emissions, as of 2017, by just two per cent from their 2005 levels, according to the most recent Environment Canada accounting. The department reckons we are on track to reduce those by another 14 percentage points by 2030.

Should the Liberals be tempted to move further left, however, they risk ceding that middle ground to the Conservatives

But the NDP thinks its proposals will be enough, in the space of a decade, to cut emissions by another 22 percentage points beyond that, while the Greens claim the ability to cut them by another 22 percentage points beyond what the NDP can achieve. Whether this can be done at all may be fairly doubted; whether it can be done at an acceptable cost to the economy even more so. But for voters in the NDP-Green universe, this is now what is required.

Which leaves the Liberals in something of a quandary. At about 31 per cent in the polls, they are roughly four points behind the Conservatives. Are the votes they need — the votes they have lately lost — to be found among those currently backing the Conservatives? Or are they to be found among the roughly similar sized pool of voters supporting the parties to their left?