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But there was Horwath: “You’re giving them twelve hundred bucks a year, you should know them.”

The idea is to look like the boss. Done too much, it comes across as rude and overbearing, and some people probably thought she was, but Horwath made herself the debate’s centre.

Ford has said very little new since the first days of the campaign. He sounds good if you don’t know much about what he’s talking about. He took a question about why voters should trust each of the leaders, for instance, and answered with a familiar lie.

“What I say I’m going to do, we’re going to do. I’m the only one with a proven track record of governing and saving people money,” he said. Specifically, when he was a Toronto city councillor, he and his brother Rob saved taxpayers $1.16 billion, he said.

This isn’t even true-enough-for-politics. You get that number if you take a bunch of stuff they did (cut some taxes, cut some programs) and a bunch of stuff they didn’t do (give city workers huge raises), and add it all up together as if each thing were the same. Run a business that way and see how long your accountants let you live.

Ford plastered on a smile in both leaders’ debates but by the end of Sunday night you could tell his molars were just about ground down to nubs in his mouth.

Horwath certainly got under Wynne’s skin, accusing her of selling off the province’s Hydro One utility after having said she wouldn’t.

“You want people to believe we sold Niagara Falls and we didn’t,” an irritated Wynne shot back. The Liberals sold just over half of one component of the electricity system, she said. “We sold a piece of a piece of a piece.”