When you’ve only won two of the last nine Ontario general elections, maybe it’s time to try something different?

The stark reality of that math seems to be motivating the current Ontario Progressive Conservative Party Leader Patrick Brown to move the party in a very different direction from his predecessor.

Former PC leader Tim Hudak, who just resigned from Ontario politics, ran two unabashedly, ideologically conservative election campaigns in 2011 and 2014. Those campaigns made his most ardent supporters feel good. But given that 65 per cent (in 2011) and 69 per cent (in 2014) of Ontarians voted against the PCs in those elections, Hudak’s failure to expand his support base by being too rigidly conservative was problematic to his party’s electoral success.

Brown seems to get that, and ever since taking over the PC leadership some 15 months ago, he’s tried hard to expand the party’s base of support.

His first public speech after winning the leadership was to a nurses’ union, a pretty dramatic turnaround from Hudak’s PCs, who made enmity with the union movement a sine qua non of his leadership style.

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During the 2014 election campaign, Hudak skipped participating in the northern Ontario leaders’ debate. Conversely, Brown has visited the north 20 times as leader, and is convinced he can win seats there. (The PCs currently have two of the north’s 11 seats).

And, of course, Brown has made great inroads into minority communities, who were the backbone of his support when he won his party’s leadership.

Red Tories – progressive Conservatives – never felt welcomed in Hudak’s PC party. And one thing that would help them to genuinely embrace Brown, whom they tend to regard as a hard right-wing, socially conservative, Stephen Harper backbencher is a sign from the party’s elder statesman that Patrick Brown is okay with him.

There isn’t a more successful Progressive Conservative politician alive in Canada today than Bill Davis. Winner of four straight elections (no one had done that since before the First World War), the second-longest serving premier of Ontario ever at 14 years, Davis hasn’t exactly avoided Brown heretofore, but he hadn’t made any efforts to get to know him either. Like most Red Tories, he’d assumed Brown was like all Harper backbenchers: too extreme, too ideological, and unwilling to reach beyond that narrow base.

And besides that, Davis has had an excellent relationship with Premier Kathleen Wynne, who takes his calls and listens to his advice. At age 87, Davis is still remarkably plugged-in and influential in politics. Just ask the mayor of his hometown of Brampton, who crossed swords in public with him over the proposed route of that city’s LRT. To cut to the chase, the old premier bested the new mayor when it came to a vote at council.

In any event, this past weekend, the old leader and the current leader had their first ever heart-to-heart, sit-down meeting at the former premier’s cottage on Georgian Bay. Davis wanted to get a sense of whether Brown really was a centrist Progressive Conservative, as opposed to an ideological right winger. and I’m told he came away pleasantly surprised.

Brown spent most of an afternoon listening to advice from the wise old sage, and doing his best to convince Davis that Red Tories, who have felt politically disconnected for years, are welcomed back into his PC party.

Despite the warm relationship between Davis and Wynne, both parties have understood that when the election bell rings, Bill Davis has been a Progressive Conservative member in good standing for more than seven decades and will be there for his party. In fact, the former premier has even joked about it at events he’s done with Premier Wynne.

“I’m happy to be of assistance and wish you well,” he muses, “right up until six months before the next election.”

Davis was 41 when he became premier in 1971. Brown will celebrate his 40th birthday in the midst of the 2018 election campaign. As his recent statements about scrapping the new sex-ed curriculum suggest, he’s still walking the tightrope every PC leader has to walk, ensuring he keeps social conservatives inside the big blue tent, while not alienating less religious supporters who are tired of the party’s irrelevance in almost all of urban Ontario.

No one walked that tightrope better than Bill Davis. Progressive Conservative supporters, anxious to break their losing streak, had better hope Patrick Brown was taking notes last weekend on Georgian Bay.