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Their leader’s personal credibility — as an idealist, as a feminist, as an anti-racist — being as much a liability in this election as it was an asset the last, the party has evidently chosen not to burden him with much in the way of serious promises. Whole sections of the Liberal platform — a 25 per cent reduction in cellular phone bills, a national pharmacare plan, net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 — might as well have been drawn from the air, so lacking are they in either detail or plausibility. About the best you can say for them is that, having implemented a national carbon price in their first four years, they are probably committed to raising it further in their second — if only they would admit it.

The first necessity, then, is to remove the Liberals from power. To return them with a majority, especially, would amount to rewarding them for their bad behaviour. And yet a Liberal minority would arguably be even worse, dependent as it would be on the support of the NDP and perhaps the Greens. Spending is already at all-time record levels: to ratchet it up to anywhere near the level the left-wing parties would demand would be madness.

Could there be a worse choice? Yes: a Conservative majority. The Tories have spent the past four years learning nothing from their defeat. Much of their platform is lifted from the Harper era — the same micro-meddlesome tax credits for children’s fitness and the like, the same crass taste for the politically attractive over the economically sensible (relaxing lending standards, for example, as a solution to the problem of high housing prices), only with even more truckling to Quebec nationalism: a Scheer government would allow the government of Quebec to collect federal income taxes, hand over further powers to the province over immigration, and look the other way at the Legault government’s bullying of racial and religious minorities.