The Patrick Brown bogeyman may have faded, but his ghost is still hanging over the race to replace him as leader of Ontario’s Tories.

With Brown now down and out of the contest — just in time for Wednesday’s leadership debate — rival candidates competed not just in denouncing the man to whom they once pledged fidelity, but dismissing the policies their party once paid fealty to.

Just weeks after the Progressive Conservatives released The People’s Guarantee — their much-touted election policy platform — the guarantee is no longer being honoured. Instead, Tories spent much of the televised debate tiptoeing around the party’s grassroots, while trampling over their own political foundations.

With Brown gone, Doug Ford confirmed his status as the leader of the pack, dragging the party into a make-believe land where global warming is just a chapter in a book of fiction — and the party can merely turn the page. No cap and trade, no carbon tax, no carbon pricing — just a blank page.

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Ford led the charge on the PC carbon contortions, trotting out his favourite slogan — “cap the carbon tax and trade Kathleen Wynne.” But he never fully explained how he could achieve the impossible feats of defying federal law, lowering greenhouse gas emissions, and funding those multi-billion-dollar tax cuts and assorted election sweeteners (all bankrolled by that disappearing carbon tax in the Tory platform).

And yet, like a skilled magician onstage, he still pulled off the remarkable feat of sounding like he meant it — while casting his rivals as somehow insincere for lacking his supposed convictions on carbon. He’s right, for in truth, they just aren’t as skilled in the dark art of deception.

Presumed frontrunner Christine Elliott flailed onstage as she purported to oppose a carbon tax, hoping viewers would forget that she wavered at the outset when promising to first consult the grassroots and caucus before taking a position. Rival candidate Caroline Mulroney also feigned consistency on carbon — conveniently overlooking her own short-lived flirtation with the truth (initially trying to level with the grassroots by pointing out that Ottawa would impose a carbon tax if the province didn’t) — until she, too, fell into line and followed Ford’s lead.

Ford shamelessly claimed credit, boasting that if he hadn’t been the one to “bring them along kicking and screaming about the carbon tax, we’d still have the carbon tax.” Fair point, even if it’s for the worse.

Tanya Granic Allen, the fringe candidate who opposes a modernized sex-ed curriculum, again assumed the role of spoiler, playing up her pet issue while connecting the dots on global warming and renewable energy. She vowed to “take those wind turbines and rip them out of the ground . . . those wind turbines will be gone,” prompting approving cheers from Ford at his podium.

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Granic Allen’s spoiler persona dragged Elliott into the fight, as the frontrunner attempted a lawyerly riposte about the fine print of renewable energy contracts having to be respected (as one might have expected from traditional Progressive Conservatives). But the fact that a party now leading in the public opinion polls was spending valuable TV debating time promising to rip every wind turbine out of the ground in Ontario today suggests that Tories are tilting at windmills.

It was as if Granic Allen and Ford had conspired to turn the party upside down, dragging PCs from climate change denial to sex-ed denial.

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When Elliott tried valiantly to recast herself as a friend of such social conservatism, promising to review the curriculum she had previously supported (before resigning as an MPP), Ford teamed up again for another spoiler alert. He derided Elliott’s late-onset social conservatism conversion, noting that he’d known her as a family friend for years but now wondered which Christine Elliott was pitching herself to Tories: “Are they going to get the Christine that was for sex ed, or the Christine that’s maybe against sex ed?” Ditto on her changed climate change stance.

Even without Patrick Brown onstage, it was an oddly disruptive and destructive debate. The candidate of the fringe versus the frontrunner; the famous Ford against the famous Mulroney; Tories insisting they’d rip up wind turbine contracts, reverse sex-ed curriculums, and nullify carbon taxes.

They promised the impossible to the party grassroots, telling them what they wanted to hear — as if the rest of the province wasn’t listening to their tall tales a mere 100 days from voting day. They may have banished the Brown bogeyman, but don’t Tories believe in ghosts?

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Martin Regg Cohn's political column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. mcohn@thestar.ca, Twitter: @reggcohn

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