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With their new election platform, the Progressive Conservatives are the party to beat in Ontario in 2018, if the spring election is to be judged according to who promises to stuff more goodies into your pockets.

Under Patrick Brown, the Tories have been transforming into a party of the left. With their “People’s Guarantee”, signed dramatically by their leader at their weekend convention in Toronto, there’s no going back before Election Day.

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The only thing the Liberals are spending on that the Tories wouldn’t is the environment: They’d scrap a couple of billion dollars a year in spending to avert climate change. They’d actually collect even more money from charging for carbon emissions — via a much broader carbon tax administered by the federal government, rather than the Liberals’ existing cap-and-trade system — but they’d give those revenues back in income-tax cuts.

(Stéphane Dion promised to do substantially that when he was federal Liberal leader a decade ago. The federal Conservatives derided it as a “permanent tax on everything” and all but called him a communist. Now it’s Progressive Conservative policy.)