Tanya Granic Allen is the most idealistic candidate I’ve ever seen take the stage in a Canadian political debate. This presents some awkward challenges for the candidates facing her, especially Mulroney and Elliot.

First, there’s the simple fact of her idealism. I think Granic Allen genuinely believes everything she says. For her, knowing what’s right and what’s wrong is simple. There isn’t a whole lot of grey. She even (bless her) probably believes that this will be an advantage come election time. People overwhelming don’t like the equivocation of politicians, so Granic Allen must assume her unequivocal moral stances will be a welcome change

For many people, it must be. Even for those who find it grating, it seems almost vulgar to attack her. It’s clear that she isn’t in this for herself and doesn’t really care about personal power. Whether she could maintain that innocence in the face of the very real need to make political compromises remains an open question, but for now she does represent a certain vein of ideological conservatism in a form that is unsullied by concerns around electability.

The problem here is that the stuff Granic Allen is pushing – “conscience rights” and “parental choice” – is exactly the sort of thing that can mobilize opposition to the PC party. Fighting against sex-ed and abortion might play well with the base, but Elliot and Mulroney know that unbridled social conservatism is one of the few things that can force the province’s small-l liberals to hold their noses and vote for the big-L Liberal Party. In an election where we can expect embarrassingly low turnout (it was 52% in 2014), this can play a major role.

A less idealistic candidate would temper themselves to help the party in the election. Granic Allen has no interest in doing this, which basically forces the pragmatists to navigate the tricky act of distancing themselves from her popular (with the base) proposals so that they might carry the general election.

Second, there’s the difficult interaction between the anti-rational and anti-empirical “common sense” conservatism pushed by Granic Allen and Ford and the pragmatic, informed conservatism of Elliot and Mulroney.

For Ford and Granic Allen, there’s a moral nature to truth. They live in a just world where something being good is enough to make it true. Mulroney and Elliot know that reality has an anti-partisan bias.

Take clean energy contracts. Elliot quite correctly pointed out that ripping up contracts willy-nilly will lead to a terrible business climate in Ontario. This is the sort of suggestion we normally see from the hard left (and have seen in practice in places the hard left idolizes, like Venezuela). But Granic Allen is committed to a certain vision of the world and in her vision of the world, government getting out of the way can’t help but be good.

Christine Elliot has (and this is a credit to her) shown that she’s not very ideological, in that she can learn how the world really works and subordinate ideology to truth, even when inconvenient. This would make her a more effective premier than either Granic Allen or Ford, but might hurt her in the leadership race. I’ve seen her freeze a couple times when she’s faced with defending how the world really works to an audience that is ideologically prevented from acknowledging the truth.

(See for example, the look on her face when she was forced to defend her vote to ban conversion therapy. Elliot’s real defense of that bill probably involves phrases like “stuck in the past”, “ignorant quacks” and “vulnerable children who need to be protected from people like you”. But she knew that a full-throated defense of gender dysphoria as a legitimate problem wouldn’t win her any votes in this race.)

As Joseph Heath has pointed out, this tension between reality and ideology is responsible for the underrepresentation of modern conservatives among academics. Since the purpose of the academy is (broadly) truth-seeking, we shouldn’t be surprised to see it select against an ideology that explicitly rejects not only the veracity of much of the products of this truth seeking (see, for example, Granic Allen’s inability to clearly state that humans are causing climate change) but the worthwhileness of the whole endeavour of truth seeking.

When everything is trivially knowable via the proper application of “common-sense”, there’s no point in thinking deeply. There’s no point in experts. You just figure out what’s right and you do it. Anything else just confuses the matter and leaves the “little guy” to get shafted by the elites.

Third, the carbon tax has produced a stark, unvoiced split between the candidates. On paper, all are opposing it. In reality, only Ford and Granic Allen seriously believe they have any chance at stopping it. I’m fairly sure that Elliot and Mulroney plan to mount a token opposition, then quickly fold when they’re reminded that raising taxes and giving money to provinces is a thing the Federal Government is allowed to do. This means that they’re counting on money from the carbon tax to balance their budget proposals. They can’t say this, because Ford and Granic Allen are forcing them to the right here, but I would bet that they’re privately using it to reassure fiscally conservative donors about the deficit.

Being unable to discuss what is actually the centrepiece of their financial plans leaves Elliot and Mulroney unable to give very good information about how they plan to balance the budget. They have to fall back on empty phrases like “line by line by line audit” and “efficiencies”, because anything else feels like political suicide.

This shows just how effective Granic Allen has been at being a voice for the grassroots. By staking out positions that resonate with the base, she’s forcing other leadership contestants to endorse them or risk losing to her. Note especially how she’s been extracting promises from Elliot and Mulroney whenever possible – normally around things she knows they don’t want to agree to but that play well with the base. By doing this, she hopes to remove much of their room to maneuver in the general election and prevent any big pivot to centre.

Whether this will work really depends on how costly politicians find breaking promises. Conventional wisdom holds that they aren’t particularly bothered by it. I wonder if Granic Allen’s idealism blinds her to this fact. I’m certainly sure that she wouldn’t break a promise except under the greatest duress.

On the left, it’s very common to see a view of politics that emphasizes pure and moral people. The problem with the system, says the communist, is that we let greedy people run it. If we just replaced them all with better people, we’d get a fair society. Granic Allen is certainly no communist. But she does seem to believe in the “just need good people” theory of government – and whether she wins or loses, she’s determined to bring all the other candidates with her.

This isn’t an incrementalist approach, which is why it feels so foreign to people like me. Granic Allen seems to be making the decision that she’d rather the Conservatives lose (again!) to the Liberals than that they win without a firm commitment to do things differently.

The conflict in the Ontario Conservative party ­– the conflict that was surfaced when his rivals torpedoed Patrick Brown – is around how far the party is willing to go to win. The Ontario Conservatives aren’t the first party to go through this. When UK Labour members picked Jeremy Corbyn, they clearly threw electability behind ideological purity.

In the Ontario PC party, Allen and Ford have clearly staked out a position emphasizing purity. Mulroney and Elliot have just as clearly chosen to emphasize success. Now it’s up to the members. I’m very interested to see what they decide.