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Now Brown is trying to convince his own people he isn’t a plant from the Liberals or the United Nations or some other shadowy fraternity of freedom-haters.

The party’s out with a video, starring firmly conservative MPP Monte McNaughton — the party’s critic for economic development and jobs, at that. He explains that really, this has all been a terrible misunderstanding.

“We’ve let others frame us as if there’s a contradiction between caring about the environment and being a conservative,” McNaughton says in the video.

Yeah, no, you guys did that to yourselves.

Ontario’s Tories have a baby version of the problem that besets the Republican party now in the United States: That party’s bosses have spent a couple of decades convincing their members that Washington is irreparably broken and politicians are crooks and book-learning is for weenies. Now they have Donald Trump stealing the party away from them with their own arguments.

Here, the Progressive Conservatives have spent years denigrating environmentalism in principle and frets about climate change in particular. If you’re a politician, even trying to take on climate change disqualifies you from a lot of conservatives’ support now because that’s exactly how the Tories wanted it. But refusing to take on climate change disqualifies you in the minds of a lot of other voters. Which it should, because it’s aggressively stupid.

The party video is a history lesson for conservatives accustomed to crossing themselves whenever anybody mentions Reagan or Thatcher. It troops out clips of them both, talking about environmental protection as a common-sense idea for everyone, not a liberal or conservative notion. It even includes a clip of Stephen Harper urging action on climate change, back when he pretended he thought it was important.