Ontario voters can cast an early ballot before 8 p.m. tonight — tens of thousands will have done so already, if previous elections are any guide. But there’s one big difference between this contest and the last four: it’s just eight days until election day, and one of the parties that could potentially form government — the Progressive Conservatives — doesn’t have a platform.

The Tories updated their website on Wednesday morning with a breakdown of Doug Ford’s spending and policy goals — but while the site now helpfully provides cost estimates for PC commitments (it didn’t as recently as Tuesday), it still doesn’t include a consolidated estimate of spending and revenue changes, nor an indication of the impact such changes would have on the provincial budget.

There has also been no independent assessment of the party’s aims, whereas the People’s Guarantee, assembled under then-PC leader Patrick Brown in November 2017, was reviewed and deemed “reasonable” by former parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page.

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While this isn’t unprecedented in Ontario, it’s highly unusual. Going back to 2003 — the last vote before the era of fixed election dates began — the Tories have never left things this late. The Liberals and the Greens have released platforms in every election since 2003, and while the New Democrats didn’t release a comprehensive platform in 2007, then-leader Howard Hampton clearly laid out the party’s six core priorities, which he said were conditions for co-operating with the NDP’s rivals in the legislature. More important, he also provided a cost estimate: $9.1 billion in new spending, offset in part by increasing business and tobacco taxes.

In recent years, the major party that’s come closest to election day without having produced a platform (besides Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives, that is), has been Kathleen Wynne’s victorious 2014 Liberals, who formally released their platform on May 25 — still more than two weeks in advance of the vote. And in that case, the party had been campaigning on its spring budget for some time, meaning the financial details of its plans were already publicly available.

To put it simply: since the turn of the millennium, Tory-curious voters have never had less than weeks, and rarely had less than months, to contemplate the PCs’ plans for forming government. And no other party so close to forming government has gotten so near election day without a consolidated platform as the PCs have.

While Ford has inherited a political situation unlike any faced by other PC leaders in recent Ontario history, it’s still not obvious why the party hasn’t yet replaced the People’s Guarantee. Ford took the helm on March 10, and his staff quickly set about playing down expectations that a lengthy policy document was in the offing.

In the absence of a true PC platform, independents have stepped into the void. Economist Mike Moffatt has estimated that the Tories, based on their spending commitments, would produce a deficit of $5.8 billion next year. Don Drummond, in Maclean’s, also tried to square Tory promises about fiscal restraint with all the new spending to which Ford has committed.

One potential explanation for the Tories’ reluctance to release a platform is that a platform does not necessarily guarantee political success. It can, as the party knows all too well, secure defeat.

In 2007, voters had months to chew over John Tory’s promise to provide public funding for separate religious schools, and they eventually decided to return the Liberals to power. An item in the PCs’ 2011 platform would have compelled some inmates in provincial prisons to work 40 hours a week in low-skilled positions; critics likened it to the introduction of “chain gangs,” and voters once again returned the Tories to the opposition benches. In 2014, “100,000 job cuts” was used as verb, noun, adjective, ringtone, and cudgel to beat the Tories into submission and return Wynne to the Premier’s Office with a majority.

So it’s understandable that the Tory leadership might be a bit gun-shy about producing a platform that could be used against them. But the absence of a platform isn’t helping them either — and more important, it isn’t helping Ontarians decide whom to vote for on June 7.

Correction: An earlier version of this article failed to mention that the NDP had provided cost estimates along with its 2007 election priorities. TVO.org regrets the error.