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Those contacts are now bearing fruit. He has visited every riding in the province, trying to change the complexion of the Ontario PC party. He said his analysis suggested 84% of the dwindling 10,000 remaining members were over 50 “and not diverse in the slightest.”

Yet when one Conservative took his 15-year-old daughter to a recent leadership debate and toured the suites afterward, “she pointed out that his was the only one that looked like modern Ontario — lots of energy, totally diverse, with young and old, and lots of colour.”

Mr. Brown has been to India 15 times and knows the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, from his time as Chief Minister of Gujarat.

The big knock against the MP from Barrie is that nobody knows where he stands on any given issue.

“There’s not much ‘there’ there,” said an organizer from one rival camp. Certainly, there is no evidence that he is the more ideological of the two leading candidates, as has been suggested by other campaigns (he calls himself a “pragmatic Conservative”).

But he may have hit on a platform of such brilliant simplicity that it takes him all the way to the leader’s office. He said he was visiting Mr. Modi in 2009 when he shared what he had done to turn Gujarat into one of India’s most successful states. “You need to have good roads, cheap power and cut red tape, he told me.

Look at Ontario, we have gridlock that is suffocating the urban hubs; the most expensive power in North America; and, it is a haven for red tape. My goal for Ontario is to make it the easiest place to invest and create jobs,” he said.