Political conventions are all about renewal and rebirth.

But a 10-month race for the leadership of Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives, which culminated this weekend with the election of Patrick Brown, was less about resurrection than revelation:

The provincial Tories revealed themselves to be in far worse condition than anyone had ever fathomed.

Now, under the unknown Brown — a right-leaning, pro-life, anti-gay-marriage social conservative — the PCs may be in bigger trouble than previously imagined. Never mind the last four election losses, and the virtual disappearance of the PCs from the GTA’s electoral map.

All that was well known.

Who knew that the once-proud party had dwindled to barely 10,000 members last year from a peak of 100,000? Who could have known that its most influential MPPs — and its deputy leader, Christine Elliott — would prove to be such uninspiring campaigners, leaving the race wide open to an unknown challenger?

Patrick Brown knew.

Even if no one had heard of him, Brown knew better than anyone that the party was so moribund that only a modicum of organizational savvy could produce a successful takeover. All he needed was an army of instant Tories.

How did he know? Brown is a lifetime Tory who headed its youth wing as a teenager, became a city councillor while in university, and rode the Stephen Harper wave to Ottawa as MP from Barrie. At 36, the PC Party is the story of his life.

Unseasoned and unheralded on Parliament Hill, untapped for cabinet, Brown had something else that counted for more: An unrivalled ability to count, selling memberships by the tens of thousands at $10 a head.

He out-hired, out-organized, outhustled, outsold and outmanoeuvred his competitors — whose lack of competitiveness made his march to victory a romp.

Brown went where no Ontario PCs had gone before in any numbers. He deserves full credit for copying the federal Conservative playbook by meeting and greeting and wooing and recruiting people in every church, temple, mosque and synagogue he could find across the province — proven vectors for reaching congregations that still congregate in person.

There is nothing wrong — and much that is good — in opening up a party that was too old, too white, too WASP and too rural to reflect modern Ontario and its urban voting base.

Brown was also backed by Christian evangelicals and the Campaign Life Coalition because he’d once voted to bring in new laws on abortion and revisit the legalization of gay marriage. He pandered shamelessly to opponents of the sex education curriculum, securing the support of social conservatives. And he was strongly supported by members of the Ontario Landowners’ Association, a libertarian movement that wants to get government off the land of landowners.

For all those reasons, Brown had an unbeatable advantage that allowed him to overtake his slow-moving rivals and take over the party. By all those measures, he deserved to win the PC leadership.

But does the PC party — and the province — deserve better than a driven organizer with no evident grasp of public policy, and no compelling life story? Selling 40,000 memberships through religious and ethnic networks is a proven strategy, but it is not rocket science. Saying a few greetings in foreign languages — as Brown did from the victory podium Saturday — is nice, but not persuasive.

Outreach is a necessary but not sufficient condition to winning a general election campaign. The Liberal party is hardly new to the game of harvesting votes in cultural communities and building electoral coalitions.

Brown doubtless knows better than to continue hewing rightward now that he has secured the leadership. Despite past pandering, he will reposition himself, post-convention, for a general election.

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He has promised an end to the bad habits of the recent PC past: No more vilification of “union bosses.” No more snubbing of New Canadians. No more mass firings of civil servants in campaign platforms.

What will he offer in place of discredited ideological nostrums? Impossible to say, given that Brown pointedly avoided saying anything substantive in the campaign.

His victory speech indulged in the usual shout-outs and platitudes. It’s not that he has a hidden agenda, just no discernible agenda.

Candidates who are low on content try to emphasize character. Yet Brown’s life story is so one-dimensional — an obsessive organizer from start to finish line — that it’s a hard story to tell.

Brown is not just an unknown, he seems utterly unknowable. But he will have to show voters something, because they won’t vote for an empty suit.

His chief liability is that he will be easier for critics to caricature — an unmarried, anti-gay-marriage, pro-life politician presiding over the party’s possible death spiral. Yet Brown may yet surprise the province.

Despite his record of cultivating social conservatives, he keeps stressing pragmatism as the path to power. He defied expectations by winning the party leadership, and is backed by many of the same professional organizers who helped make Rob Ford (open Rob Ford's policard) mayor against all odds.

After revelation, resurrection?

The PCs have made their choice. Soon, the rest of the province gets its say.

As Brown basks in the glow of his triumph with a PC party he helped grow, he will have to repeat the feat with a tougher crowd — the electorate.

The new Tory leader may be unformed, but he is no fool. He knows that winning the leadership and the premiership are two different things.

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