Let’s get this clear right off the top: no Canadian kid grows up dreaming of being Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. You grow up dreaming of being prime minister or premier.

But the fact is, as often as not, the road to the top job often goes through the worst job in politics. Look at the list here in the province of Ontario. Over the past three decades, Dalton McGuinty, Mike Harris, Bob Rae, and David Peterson all spent time on the opposition side of the floor before becoming premier.

Nationally over the past three decades, Justin Trudeau, Stephen Harper, Jean Chrétien, and Brian Mulroney all did time on the opposition benches before becoming prime minister.

Unless you inherited the post while your party was already in government, as Kathleen Wynne, Ernie Eves, Paul Martin, and Kim Campbell did, you started your road to the top by doing a job whose skill set barely resembles the job you want.

Yes, like the PM or premier, the leader of an opposition party has to manage a caucus, put the right people in the right jobs, project an image of strength and competence, and ultimately, make those tough decisions that can define your political career and your country’s or province’s path.

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But one of the biggest parts of the job, getting up in the legislature or day in and day out, marshalling your best performance skills of outrage and trying to make the first minister and the cabinet look as incompetent as possible is not the job of a first minister.

We’ve learned over the past week that figuring out that opposition leader’s role is a bit like learning how to play the violin in public. It can be downright embarrassing, as Ontario PC Party leader Patrick Brown has discovered. Brown’s volte-faces on the sex-ed curriculum debate have been almost unprecedented. If you’re new to the story, Brown gave the impression he opposed Liberals’ efforts to modernize the sex-ed curriculum while running for the party leadership, but later said he was only critical of the limited parental consultation undertaken by the government and largely supported the change. Then last week a PC campaign letter in the Scarborough-Rouge River byelection fight emerged, suggesting Brown would scrap the new curriculum. When howls of outrage ensued, Brown penned an op-ed for the Toronto Star a couple of days ago, confessing the letter was a mistake and that yes, he was still supportive of the government’s aims, if not every detail of the plan.

Brown’s mea culpa included a bit of a pat on the back for himself, suggesting it’s worse in politics to plow through with an indefensible position, rather than just fessing up to an error and moving forward. With the byelection happening Thursday, Brown is hoping his candour may help keep the Tories competitive in a riding they haven’t won in 30 years, and which they lost in 2007 by 50 points. That’s not a misprint. Scarborough has been reliably red for ages.

In other words, the “flip-flop-flip” was the worst kind of error in politics ̶ an unforced error.

But before everybody gets all righteous and sanctimonious about this, let’s take a deeper dive into the issue. We criticize politicians all the time for sticking to positions, even when it’s ridiculous to continue doing so. Brown could have tried to defend the letter. Presumably there will be fair-minded people who will give him credit for owning up to the mistake and correcting it. He’s certainly hoping so.

And it’s not as if the governing Liberals haven’t had the odd change of heart on an issue. Let’s remember the sex-ed update was supposed to happen a decade ago under Premier Dalton McGuinty, who first initiated the review and was adamant about the necessity of doing so. But when the temperature got too hot, McGuinty pulled the plug on the attempt.

During Kathleen Wynne’s premiership, there have been a few high-profile 180-degree turns. The last budget proposed significant fee increases for some seniors purchasing their medication. After an immediate barrage of criticism, Wynne backed down. On the autism file, the government insisted it was listening to the experts by only funding intensive behavioral therapy up to age five. But when the heat got too hot, Wynne shuffled the minister responsible for the issue out of the job, and let the new minister change government policy to satisfy opposition and parental demands.

And perhaps the granddaddy of them all was Wynne’s firm determination to keep the old “Wild, Wild West” political fundraising rules in place, saying it was “part of the democratic process,” only to have a spectacular change of heart. She’s now championing what may turn out to be the strictest new rules in the country, banning corporate and union donations, dramatically lowering the amount one is able to give, clamping down on third party advertisers, and just this week, floating the idea of banning fundraising by politicians altogether, where businesses and other key stakeholders often feel pressure to pony up despite all the obvious appearances of conflicts of interest.

The point is good politicians change their minds all the time. When it’s done for craven political reasons (as, say, the McGuinty government’s cancellation of the Mississauga gas plant during the dying days of the 2011 election campaign), that’s problematic. But when a politician knows they’ve got a call wrong, or new information comes to them, do we really want them to keep their feet in cement and stick to an outdated position come hell or high water?