Weighed down by mid-term blues, Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals are sliding in the polls.

And the blue alternative, Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives, are making a slow comeback.

Nine months after choosing Patrick Brown to lead them out of the provincial wilderness, Tories are converging on Ottawa this weekend to launch their long-awaited renewal process. With a 2018 election looming, the PCs are trying to revive the old Big Blue Machine that once powered a Tory dynasty.

The lull between elections is the ideal time for the party to retool policies, revive its membership base and redefine its little-known leader. But all these months later, the party remains a work in progress.

Not all that progressive as yet. Not working all that well together so far.

As a putative premier-in-waiting, Brown remains as much a policy mystery today as he was in the party leadership race — insisting he won’t pre-empt the grassroots by taking major stances in advance. Instead, he prefers to cast himself as a post-partisan politician, willing to endorse good ideas from rival parties (and oppose past policies from his own party, such as privatization of Hydro One).

Belatedly, this weekend will serve as the kick-off for a new policymaking process. But by stressing his organizational prowess and community outreach, the PC leader has signalled that ideology will remain an afterthought.

Brown believes the winning formula in his leadership campaign — outhustling his rivals to sign up thousands of new members — can be the template for victory in 2018. But it’s not that simple to scale up that technique in a general election, where millions of voters are in play.

Nor is it that easy to maintain momentum in the aftermath of a leadership race. After nearly a year of incessant meeting and tweeting since winning, membership is sagging, debt reduction is flagging, and caucus is squabbling.

Brown vowed to boost the party’s base to 100,000 loyalists, but multiple sources suggest he will have difficulty achieving that number as membership cards lapse. Fundraising is also proving a challenge as the party wrestles with a debt of more than $5 million leftover from the 2014 election.

And while Tory delegates converge on Ottawa, the nation’s capital will serve as an unintended backdrop for internecine rivalry that pits two members of the PC caucus against one another. The civil war that has erupted between popular Ottawa-area MPP Lisa MacLeod (Nepean—Carleton) and neighbouring MPP Jack MacLaren (Carleton—Mississippi Mills) suggests that Brown hasn’t figured out how to harness and redirect the competitive energy within his own team.

MacLeod is a rare urban, female MPP in a caucus that comes across as a mostly rural rump. Despite winning some of the biggest vote totals for her party in recent elections, she finds herself targeted for a nomination battle as MacLaren sniffs out the riding on behalf of future challengers, according to multiple sources.

Their bitter rivalry might be dismissed as hardball Eastern Ontario politics except for the window it opens into Brown’s management style.

MacLaren merits special treatment because he was one of the few members of caucus to back Brown’s leadership campaign. He was rewarded with chairmanship of a “Blue Ribbon Panel on Property Rights” indulging his libertarian obsessions as former president of the far-right Ontario Landowners Association.

MacLaren told me he’s not being disloyal, and will publicly support his fellow MPPs. But he declined to comment on his private efforts on behalf of local challengers to MacLeod.

(MacLaren came to Queen’s Park after ousting Tory MPP Norm Sterling in a bitter nomination battle in 2011, aided by his fellow Landowners. Meanwhile, the governing Liberals are trying to profit from the Tory disarray by wooing MacLeod to cross the floor, though she has rejected the overtures.)

The party line on these internal skirmishes is that Brown is merely promoting internal party democracy. But delegates won’t see all that much competition at the convention because Brown has quietly engineered a complex truce in a hard-fought race for the party’s presidency (he persuaded party loyalist Jag Badwal to drop out in favour of former Conservative MP Rick Dykstra, an old pal).

The fallout from all these pre-convention machinations and triangulations: Nick Kouvalis, whom Brown wanted as his campaign manager for the next general election, is now not on speaking terms with the leader.

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The PCs aren’t singing the blues just yet. It’s just that some of them aren’t talking to one another — let alone talking policy.

If they want to govern 13 million Ontarians, they need to govern themselves accordingly.

Martin Regg Cohn’s Ontario politics column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. mcohn@thestar.ca , Twitter: @reggcohn

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