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“Do we have all the details? No,” McKenna said at an Ottawa press conference. “We’re going to figure this out, but the first thing we need to do is we need to get through this election.”

Whenever he’s pressed on these questions — where are the details? Why should Canadians trust you? —Trudeau inevitably falls back on a ballot proposition rather than a principle: Sorry, folks, it’s either me or Andrew Scheer. “That really is the core of the choice that people are facing,” he said Wednesday morning in Delta, B.C. “A Conservative party that refuses to admit that climate change is a problem that needs real action, or a Liberal party that has recognized that we have done a lot on fighting climate change but we need to do much more.”

One can’t help be reminded, whenever he says this — which is several times every day — that electoral reform would have changed that ballot proposition: Both the NDP and the Greens have much more ambitious climate change proposals that are much more in keeping with the Liberals’ climate-emergency rhetoric. It’s precisely because of issues like climate change that so many Canadians, especially younger ones, are so desperate for electoral reform, in hopes they can break free from the middle-ground tyranny of the Liberals and Tories. Now Trudeau rubs their face in it daily.

It sure would be intriguing to see Trudeau show up at one of these climate marches. There is still a lot of goodwill for him out there, including among some young people. But Thunberg and her followers have taken the dire warnings of politicians like McKenna and Trudeau to heart; they see the yawning chasm between those warnings and the solutions being proposed; and they seem distinctly uninterested in being told, “trust us, we’ll figure something out.” As they should be. Because they almost certainly won’t.