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There isn’t much that’s less dignified than an Ontario Liberal government fighting for its life, and next week we will begin to see exactly how Premier Kathleen Wynne plans to buy off an electorate that polls suggest is properly and perhaps incurably sick of her. Wynne prorogued the legislature on Thursday and announced Lieutenant Governor Elizabeth Dowdeswell would deliver a Throne Speech on Monday. The budget — suddenly and conveniently in deficit by as much as $8 billion, Finance Minister Charles Sousa announced last week — will follow shortly thereafter on the 28th.

Get out your mooching sacks, my fellow Ontarians. The big ones.

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This is exactly the sort of sad-sack tactic that Patrick Brown’s middle-of-the-road People’s Guarantee platform was designed to fend off. It reflected opinion research showing that as much as Ontarians might loathe the Liberals, they certainly don’t hate all of their policies: the $15 minimum wage is popular; the real estate tax for foreign buyers is popular; not many of us objected to extending rent control. If the People’s Guarantee didn’t explicitly propose changing something, the party wanted you to know, then it wouldn’t change.