Ontario’s Progressive Conservative leadership hopefuls are veering to the right. This in itself is not unusual.

There is an important right wing within the party. All candidates want to capture the votes of those who identify themselves with it.

Which is why, in last week’s leadership debate, alleged moderate Christine Elliott pronounced herself opposed to Ontario’s sex education curriculum.

And which is also why Caroline Mulroney, another alleged moderate, now opposes a carbon tax she once backed.

What is unusual is the timing. Normally, a new party leader who wishes to return to the ideological centre before the next general election has plenty of time to do so. In this case, the contenders have not been accorded that luxury. The new leader is to be chosen March 10, less than three months before Ontario goes to the polls.

To win in that June 7 general election, the Tories need two things to happen. First, they have to take advantage of the unpopularity of Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne. Second, they must do so without spooking centrist voters.

In particular, they have to avoid letting the Liberals paint them as economic or social extremists.

That’s what happened in the 2014 election. The Tories were on the way to victory until then leader Tim Hudak announced plans to eliminate 100,000 public-service jobs. That plus a maladroit New Democratic Party campaign allowed the Wynne Liberals to capture a majority of seats in the Legislature.

In the run-up to this year’s general election, the Tories initially went out of their way to avoid getting caught in another Hudak trap.

Then-leader Patrick Brown recanted his early enthusiasm for social conservative policies. Among other things, he dropped his opposition to the Liberal government’s sex education curriculum.

To allay fears that the Tories were climate-change deniers, he announced support for a carbon tax. And he released a platform that promised to keep in place most of Wynne’s popular reforms — including a pharmacare plan for young people.

In effect, he was trying to reassure centrist and centre-left voters that, if elected to government, the Tories wouldn’t do anything crazy.

That in turn, it was hoped, would bleed off Liberal support to the NDP in three-way races and allow the Tories to come up the middle.

But then Brown was cashiered — the casualty of an alleged sex scandal. Unless he manages to use Friday’s last-minute leadership bid to resurrect himself, so is his platform.

His would-be successors — former Toronto councillor Doug Ford, former MPP Elliott, political celebrity Mulroney and social conservative activist Tanya Granic Allen — all say they now oppose the carbon tax that was the fiscal centrepiece of the platform.

With the exception of Mulroney all oppose the current sex education curriculum.

The old platform, Granic Allen said, “died the day Patrick Brown resigned.”

She’s right. And with it died the Conservative strategy of how to manoeuvre through the general election campaign.

Thursday’s debate did not showcase the party as a collection of fiscally responsible moderates. Indeed, thanks to Granic Allen’s bravura performance, it was as if all energy in the party came from the hard right. She dominated the debate.

Elliott and Mulroney were anemic by comparison. Even Ford seemed tame.

Given the complicated nature of the PC voting procedure, none of the leadership candidates can ignore the social conservatives that Granic Allen claims to represent. Even if she doesn’t win, her second or third ballot support could put one of the other contenders over the top.

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But the more time the Tories spend pandering to the right in this leadership race, the more they risk in the soon-to-follow general election.

That is the strange quandary in which they find themselves.

Thomas Walkom appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

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