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The difference, the minister insisted, is that the Harper target was a “fake” target it had no intention of delivering on. Whereas this is a “real” target. It’s still inadequate — among the least ambitious of the major economies, who themselves have yet to commit to anything like the reductions most scientists believe necessary to achieve the UN’s goal of holding global warming to two degrees C above pre-industrial levels. But at least the Liberals intend to achieve it.

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Now I know what you’re thinking. Didn’t the previous Liberal government also commit to an emissions reductions target at Kyoto in 1997 — six per cent from 1990 levels — without the first clue of how to achieve it, a nullity amply reflected in the nine years of inaction that followed?

But this time is different. Because unlike the Chrétien Liberals, and the Harper Conservatives, the Trudeau government has a — well no, they don’t really have a plan, do they? They have a plan to make a plan. Of course, in the feds’ absence the biggest provinces have gone ahead with their own plans, whether the carbon tax that British Columbia has already implemented and Alberta says it will, or the cap-and-trade schemes that Ontario and Quebec are at various stages of introducing.

So the federal plan, so far as there is one, amounts for the most part to telling the provinces to do what they are already doing: different programs, with different coverage, different exceptions and offsets, and not as a substitute for all the other provincial and federal programs enacted over the years in the name of fighting climate change — the subsidies for green technologies and conservation incentives and regulatory edicts of all kinds — but layered on top of them. The new element would appear to be that the feds will set a floor under the provincial schemes: the price put on carbon emissions, whether via a carbon tax or its cap-and-trade equivalent, will have to exceed some federally-set minimum.