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But byelection turnouts are low, energizing your loyalists matters more than it does in a general election, poking the sex-education button is an easy rush, and Scarborough-Rouge River is such a sweet prize. Hence Brown’s letter.

The Liberals fired off a base-activating campaign of their own, criticizing Brown as a flip-flopper while implying that he’s not interested in “keeping Ontario’s kids healthy and safe.” Hard-edged social conservative or floppy-principled grasper — whichever bugs you more, that’s what they want you to think he is.

The Liberals aren’t novices, but if Brown’s fallen to short-term thinking, he might have learned it by watching them. Wynne and her people meddled in a byelection in Sudbury to give New Democrat MP Glenn Thibeault their nomination over a competent local Liberal. They got to poke the NDP in the eye at the cost of permanently damaging Wynne’s reputation for decency. Dumb.

Less harmfully, but still stupidly, the Liberals invested in trying to win the Tory seat in Whitby-Oshawa that opened when the Progressive Conservatives’ former leader-in-waiting Christine Elliott resigned to take a government appointment. Now-MPP Lorne Coe handed them their butts, winning a bigger share of the vote for the Tories than Elliott ever did.

Here’s the thing: You can tell how people will govern by the way they practise politics. Kathleen Wynne is competitive to a fault, a quality often useful in her line of work but dangerous because it can make you lose perspective. An opposition leader who can play a long game could outwork, outwait and outwit her. Instead, we get Doug Ford and weaseling on sex education.

That’s all a problem for Brown politically. It’s a bigger problem for Ontarians, who might like a government run by people who can think beyond the end of the week.

dreevely@postmedia.com

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