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At any rate, the result is a 79-page platform, or “People’s Guarantee,” of such iridescent vapidity it might have better been titled Nothing To See Here. The tag line, repeated on every page of the document, is Change That Works, I can only assume in an attempt at irony — because if there is one idea that is most powerfully communicated throughout it is that the Tories, under their impenetrably vacant leader Patrick Brown, would change next to nothing about how the province is governed.

Virtually everything the Ontario government is now doing after fourteen years of Liberal activism, including its very latest and least-considered extensions — raising the minimum wage, expanding rent controls, free drugs for under-25s, all-day kindergarten, the works — it would still be doing after four years under the Conservatives. By 2022, spending would be 1.8 per cent less than it is currently projected to be, which is to say 10.6 per cent more than it is now — though in fact the Conservatives cannot identify a single program they would cut, beyond a “value for money audit.”

So while the platform is full of promises of the taxes it would cut, the prices it would slash, and the goodies it would distribute — usually dressed up, with the duplicity now in vogue, as tax credits — it is vastly less interested in discussing how any of this would be done, still less how it would be paid for.

So: electricity prices would be cut “an additional” 12 per cent. That’s pretty ambitious, considering the Liberals have promised to cut them 25 per cent. What sweeping reforms would a Progressive Conservative implement to the province’s electricity market to make this possible? None that are mentioned, beyond cutting salaries for executives at the province’s power utilities, renegotiating contracts with providers and redirecting a portion of the dividend that Hydro One, the province’s distribution monopoly, pays the government annually.