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Oddly, this does not seem to be the conventional view. The advance word on the election, rather, is that Ontario is facing a choice of unprecedented starkness, a polarizing election with no one seeming to occupy the middle ground.

“It’s hard to remember a provincial campaign that’s featured two leaders so diametrically opposed to each other,” broadcaster Steve Paikin wrote recently, of the Liberals’ Kathleen Wynne and the Conservatives’ Doug Ford. “The political centre,” agrees the Globe and Mail’s Marcus Gee, “has vanished like a puddle in the sun.”

It’s true that the Liberals and the NDP are in something of a bidding war for the left-of-centre vote. If the March budget signalled a retreat from the Liberals’ not-overly-stringent devotion to fiscal restraint, the NDP platform goes further in every direction: about $4 billion a year further, in fact.

But it doesn’t follow that, merely because two parties have ranged far to the left, the third must have tacked similarly to the right — certainly not under its current leadership. Whatever else he is, Ford is not an ideological conservative. He may like to mouth some conservative-sounding buzzwords, but he would appear to have no considered philosophy of government of any kind: as the campaign is already revealing, he does not even know what it does, let alone what it should do.

Simplistic, ill-informed, bombastic he may be, but a conservative he is not — however much that may have come to be associated with conservatism in its current populist incarnation. But he doesn’t quite fit the populist mould, either, at least in its contemporary, racially and culturally divisive sense.

Where a Donald Trump might have insisted on the candidacy of Tanya Granic Allen, the social conservative firebrand who helped Ford win the Conservative leadership, Ford coolly dumped her the minute some ill-considered rhetoric from her past surfaced online. Ford’s attachment to social conservatism would seem to be as firm as his commitment, say, to allowing development in the Greenbelt lands surrounding Toronto: jettisoned, likewise, the minute it came under fire.

Indeed, it’s hard to know quite what he believes. When the Conservatives first unveiled the “People’s Guarantee,” the platform on which they had planned to run under the since-defenestrated Patrick Brown, it was widely seen as a sizeable step to the left, embracing nearly every one of the Wynne government’s signature policies, with the exception of its “cap-and-trade” market for greenhouse gas emissions permits, and the green energy programs it funds. In its place, the Brown Conservatives promised to acquiesce in a federal carbon tax, using the revenues (on the assumption the feds would hand these over) to cut personal income tax rates.