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Wynne slowly replaces her glasses.“Et tu, Honderich?” she murmurs. “Who’s next? Working Families? Working Ontario Women?” Silently pondering the endless perfidy of politics, she considers the usual arsenal of Liberal responses. A new wave of tax-funded “public service messages” lauding the glories of Liberal rule? Another cut to Hydro rates financed with loans run through some off-budget agency and loaded onto future generations? Painfully, she realizes it might be an idea to get that fellow in … what was his name?… to quietly wipe the office server of “personal” communications.

The Toronto Star, she moans softly. The Toronto Star

Raising her eyes to to the worried faces, she gathers her dwindling reserves of energy and barks: “Don’t just stand there staring at me, what are we going to do about it?”

The much-discussed Tory manifesto, released a full seven months before the June election, has generated a degree of perplexity evident in the reaction of those few pundits who still track activities at the Ontario legislature. Normally left-of-centre observers were pleasantly surprised at the shameless outpouring of subsidies and giveaways. More centrist writers noted the cynicism — or was it just practical politics? — of a platform that out-Liberals the Liberals. Those on the right chafed angrily at the blatant abandonment of conservative orthodoxy, even if it might finally offer a hope of victory after 15 years of abject failure.

Beneath the confusion lies a riddle wrapped in an enigma. That Brown’s guarantee bears little if any resemblance to conservative principles depends on what anyone regards those principles to be. In the age of Donald Trump and the ugly band of unscrupulous self-servers who make up the Republican majority in Congress, there can be very few self-respecting conservatives who see a bright future in embracing the bigotry, greed and flim-flam that has swallowed the U.S. capital. Is conservatism about nothing more than tax cuts? Are social conservatives the core of the camp simply because, like it or not, they claim the party as their own? Is it better to lose with orthodox conservatism than to govern from a less pristine position, just as the NDP consistently loses with the leftist equivalent?