In about a week, Progressive Conservative leader Doug Ford has reversed himself on three major issues: the Greenbelt, which he now says he’ll leave untouched; Tanya Granic Allen’s PC candidacy in the riding of Mississauga Centre, which he stripped her of on Saturday; and supervised injection sites, which he initially opposed, then suggested he’d be open to expert opinion on, then reaffirmed his opposition to.

And the campaign doesn’t formally begin until Wednesday.

Ford’s series of flip-flops has some commentators — including publisher Ken Whyte and the National Post’s Andrew Coyne — saying things like “Doug Ford has no ideology” or “he doesn't have an ideological bone in his body.” Men like Whyte and Coyne have been close observers of national politics for a while now, so it’s not as if they’re unfamiliar with conservatives such as Ralph Klein, Mike Harris, or Stephen Harper. Assuming we’re not engaged in some version of the “no true Scotsman” game, their conclusions about Ford don’t make a lot of sense. Ford’s record offers plenty of evidence that he is, in fact, very conservative indeed.

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As a Toronto city councillor, Ford supported lower taxes (at one point stating that “all taxes are evil as far as I am concerned”), reduced spending on some public services, and the privatization of other public services. Since announcing his intention to run for the PC leadership, he’s said he opposes rent control because he wants to leave housing outcomes to the private market. He’s also struck some social conservative notes as well, opposing the province’s sex-ed curriculum and pledging to restrict the rights of teenage girls to request abortions.

Not every conservative is going to agree on what constitutes a “conservative” idea, but these are pretty basic elements of Tory ideology: smaller government, lower taxes, more freedom of action for the private market, and skepticism toward anything that could be perceived as the state mucking around in the traditional realm of the family. Doug Ford ticks every box — unless we somehow define conservative ideology so as to exclude the things mainstream conservative politicians say they believe.

That even a conservative politician would do or say anything to get elected doesn’t tell us much. Politicians are frequently inconsistent around election time. In an attempt to try to calm voters anxious about his agenda, Mike Harris promised in 1995 not to cut hospital funding; he then laid off nurses by the hundreds once in power. Does anyone want to make the argument that Harris wasn’t an ideological conservative? Stephen Harper was quick to silence or expel MPs whose loose tongues threatened the party’s chances in elections. Was he not an ideological conservative?

That said, most voters don’t really care about ideology except insofar as it’s a useful predictor of how someone is going to govern. And here the skeptics have a point: Ford’s ideology, real as it is, may not be the most consistent guide to his behaviour. Indeed, when Ford has been forthright about his ideology recently, he’s then been forced to recant his own views. Voters who’ve just started tracking his political career could be forgiven for assuming there’s nothing there.

There’s something else that has been a hallmark of Ford’s behaviour through his time at city council and beyond, and it’s almost entirely unrelated to ideology: his dislike of anything even remotely associated with Toronto’s left-wing politics. It’s a thread that ties together his misguided attempts to woo developers in Toronto’s Port Lands, his enthusiasm for spending more money to deliver less transit in Scarborough, his opposition to any restriction on car use downtown, and his crass homophobic utterances during a debate about building a shower for cyclists at Toronto city hall.

In each case, Ford loudly opposed something he saw as a priority of progressive councillors: a publicly managed redevelopment instead of a developer free-for-all, light-rail transit instead of an indefensible subway plan. Instead of ideology, Doug Ford presents his supporters with conservatism as zero-sum tribalism: we win whenever the other guys lose, no matter what else happens.

The longer view of Ford’s record illuminates things that his current behaviour is obscuring (by design). But then, it’s difficult to pin down any politician based on what they say around election time. Kathleen Wynne denied NDP accusations last election that she was going to privatize public services; less than 12 months later, her party began selling off Hydro One. Andrea Horwath is running an unabashedly more progressive campaign than she did in either 2011 or 2014. Was she less of a left-wing champion four years ago than she is today — or did she simply listen to different advisers? The fact that the other two party leaders have made calculated choices about what to tell voters reveals little about the internal political compasses we know they both have. To get a sense of those, voters need to look at their records, both in government and in opposition.

Doug Ford has a compass, too — and his record makes it pretty clear what direction it points.