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Poor Sam Oosterhoff. Here he is just 19, a home-schooled farm kid from Ontario wine country, newly landed in The Big Smoke and keen to make his mark as the province’s youngest-ever MPP. But his political career is already doomed. He’s the only one in the Legislature who doesn’t appear to see it.

Reason: Oosterhoff is an orthodox Christian and a social conservative, in an era when being such is tantamount to thought crime, punishable by revulsion, penalty to be administered by flash mob on social media. This is the new face of tolerance in liberal Ontario.

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The MPP for Niagara West–Glanbrook is, of course, a pawn in a larger game; the tortuous effort by Ontario’s chronically self-defeating Progressive Conservatives, now beginning its third Biblical epoch (if we posit seven years as one epoch), to replace the catastrophically incompetent Dalton-McGuinty-Kathleen-Wynne Liberals.

You have to sympathize some with leader Patrick Brown. So desperate are his troops for a win in 2018, having fired the puck repeatedly into their own net in three successive Ontario elections — 2007, 2011 and 2014 — that any hint of a possible game-changing strategic blunder causes him to recoil as though poked in the kidney with a stick, then sprint for his life in the opposite direction.