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So the Ontario Liberals, in full election-attack mode, fired out a statement Tuesday accusing Clark — Brown’s deputy leader, mind you — of “insubordination,” “challeng(ing) his leader’s carbon tax policy position,” raising questions about Brown’s leadership qualities. You could hear the cackling from here.

Clark’s not having it.

“I support Patrick 100 per cent,” he said. O’Leary’s against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s stance in favour of pricing carbon, Brown is against what Wynne is doing specifically, and Clark thinks they’re both right. This is a very finely drawn position.

That moment in Ottawa comes up again and again when you talk to Progressive Conservatives about their leader. They’re definitely not over it. Consider Jim Karahalios, a prominent federal Conservative activist who’d been seeking the provincial nomination in Cambridge. He eventually decided that being a federal Tory was incompatible with being a provincial Tory and bailed out.

“How can I follow my conservative values, my federal party — and good old fashioned common sense — by opposing the carbon tax at the federal level, and yet at the same time join a campaign to peddle a cynical carbon tax hoax on Ontario taxpayers at the provincial level?” Karahalios wrote in a letter to supporters. It’s two dense pages, nearly all of it about the folly of carbon taxes.

Nearly all the federal Tory leadership candidates oppose taxing carbon, he pointed out. (Michael Chong is the big exception and he gets booed at debates when he brings that up.) O’Leary is the most militant about it, promising to “go to war” with Alberta Premier Rachel Notley over her government’s carbon tax. As prime minister, O’Leary says, he’d cut federal transfers to provinces by whatever amount their carbon taxes bring in.