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“I enjoy my conservative values,” she tells Shiu, after taking him through her platform with the conversational ease of someone who has done it a thousand times. She politely laughs off his question about whether she is popular enough to raise money, pointing out how quickly she gathered the campaign’s steep entry fee.

She calls herself a voice for the disenfranchised. She vows to repeal Ontario’s sex-ed curriculum because it “sexualizes children, robs them of their innocence.” Only then will she consult on a new one, with parental opt-outs available at every stage.

“Until that child’s 18, let the parents decide,” she said.

Photo by Chris Young/The Canadian Press

She wants to “get back to basics” and reverse the “dumbing down of education.” She is happy to see minimum wage workers earning a bit more, but thinks the recent increase was poorly consulted and harmful to small business.

She is against a carbon tax, and would go to court if the federal government tried to impose one. Marijuana legalization, likewise, is a plan “hatched in Ottawa and imposed on the provinces.”

Ontario, she said, does not have a revenue problem. It has a management problem.

Her slogan — “Conservative. For a change.” — carries the clever double meaning that her opponents are not conservative enough, or not truly conservative.

But it also suggests a vulnerability, of being too conservative, even for a province with an unpopular Liberal leader.

Photo by Tyler Anderson/National Post

After the Fairchild interview, over a lunch of stir-fried noodles and har gow in Richmond Hill’s Times Square plaza — with Brown’s status in the race still officially a mystery — Granic Allen said the sexual harassment allegations are beside the point. He needs to sort his life out, obviously, she said, but the reason he should not be in the race is what she alleges is his corruption in running the party.