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Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives are setting themselves up for a busy fall of reassembling provincial programs and plans they’ve spent the summer taking apart.

The social-assistance system that cares for Ontario’s most vulnerable is a horrifying mess and we’re cancelling Liberal plans to repair it, but it can still be sorted out by November, Social Services Minister Lisa MacLeod says.

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Ontario’s climate-change policy is blown up but a new one is coming, Environment Minister Rod Phillips says.

We’ll have massive provincewide consultations on a new elementary-school health curriculum that someone will get around to organizing really soon now, Education Minister Lisa Thompson says.

Confusingly, the first things the Tories have dismantled since taking office a month ago have been some of the most conservative-minded programs the Liberals started, which will make replacing them a challenge for the, er, Progressive Conservative party.

Take MacLeod’s announcement that the province is scrapping an experiment with giving social-assistance recipients a “universal basic income” instead of payments based on a complex formula that tries to assess each person’s need and degree of deservingness. We’re in the third month of a three-year pilot project, but the Tories have decided it’s a failure.

The idea of a universal basic income sounds kind of socialist: You just give money to people who don’t have enough. But its intellectual roots are in libertarianism, traceable in modern form to Milton Friedman’s 1962 manifesto “Capitalism and Freedom.” Friedman championed laissez-faire economic policy, was arguably America’s leading conservative academic for decades — he won a Nobel economics prize — and was a top adviser to Ronald Reagan.