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The polls have been a little wacky in the Ontario election so far, but according to the leading aggregator the combined total for Liberal, NDP and Green support is 66 per cent, or about two-thirds of the electorate.

Interestingly, the one major polling organization that has been showing a clear lead for the Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservatives, Ipsos Reid, also shows almost exactly the same total for the three “progressive” parties combined.

Why does this matter? After all, the Liberals, NDP and Greens are scrapping as hard against one another as they are with the PCs.

It matters because by almost all accounts there are two major issues framing this campaign. The first is a fundamental question about how Ontarians would like their economy, government and society to evolve in the coming years. And that pits the PCs squarely against all the other parties.

Even those notorious lefties on the Globe and Mail editorial board have pointed out that Hudak’s “rash” promise to cut 100,000 public sector jobs makes his platform far more radical than anything Mike Harris’ government ever tried. Most provincial public sector jobs are in education and health. What that means is that Hudak’s cuts could not be achieved without plunking our kids in larger and larger classes, and all of us waiting even longer for medical treatment when we are sick.

The NDP’s populist campaign under Andrea Horwath has promised to ‘cut waste’ in the public sector. And the Liberals’ recent budget plan also factored in unidentified ‘restraint’ to reach a balanced budget just a couple of years from now. We can assume that if either were in government after the next election, they would cut spending more than they are suggesting or they would not reduce the deficit as quickly as they promise.

But it is unimaginable that either Horwath or Kathleen Wynne would take a hatchet to government services with Hudak’s unrestrained glee.

There’s also a macroeconomic issue to consider.

The cornerstone of Tim Hudak’s economic plan is his promise to create a “million jobs” — it leaps out at us every time we turn on the TV these days. The idea is that, with a combination of corporate tax cuts and streamlined regulations, a Hudak-led Ontario government would generate an extra half-million jobs on top of the half-million the economy is expected to produce in any event.

But Hudak’s team has bungled the arithmetic almost comically, as the Ottawa Citizen’s Dave Reevely and an ideological array of economists and experts — among them Paul Boothe, Jim Stanford and iPolitics’ own Scott Clark and Peter DeVries — have all pointed out.

The dilemma progressives face is that any Liberal voter who switches to the NDP because of the corruption issue may be lowering the bar for Tim Hudak to attain power.

The PCs mixed up ‘person-years’ with permanent jobs. The result is that even if you accept their assumptions about the effects of tax cuts and regulatory change, they’ve exaggerated the job growth under their plan by seven- or eight-fold. Boothe, a well-respected moderate economist who has held very senior policy positions under both Paul Martin and Stephen Harper, suggested that when you factor in the 100,000 public sector job cuts, Hudak’s plan would actually reduce employment by an estimated 25,000 jobs in Ontario.

And that doesn’t even account for the knock-on effects of reduced government spending on the wider economy.

Of course, it’s nothing new for politicians to promise the impossible. But we can be sure that if he were elected, Hudak would make good on his promise to chop jobs, and degrade our schools and hospitals in the bargain. And we can be almost equally certain that none of the promised job creation would ever occur.

In fact, it’s a reasonable guess that Hudak’s plan would weaken not only the public sector, but the private sector as well.

That’s just awful.

So it is a good thing that 66 per cent of us don’t want any part of it. The Liberals, NDP and Greens also happen to support in varying degrees prudent measures to address climate change — the other great challenge facing our time.

But despite this overwhelming majority, the mathematics of our multi-party universe — with the progressive vote fragmented among three parties — plus the first-past-the-post electoral system, mean that Tim Hudak is well within reach of forming a government. A small uptick in his support would put him in the premier’s chair.

Yet what do we see? While the PCs have come in for a fair amount of flak from the other parties, the real action in this election is on the left and centre-left.

The logic of party competition means that like-minded progressive parties compete even more fiercely amongst themselves for like-minded voters than they do with their common foes: the PCs.

Under Wynne, the Liberals have cheated left in the hope of sopping up NDP votes. Under Horwath, the NDP have moved to the populist centre, invading Liberal and (less successfully) PC territory. Liberals being Liberals, they are fine with the change so long as it works, which for the moment seems to be the case. The NDP, however, has itself been divided, as party dissenters attack Horwath on both strategic and ideological grounds.

Horwath’s reaction has been to shift her campaign to that second issue framing this campaign: corruption. She is going after the Liberals over the gas-plant scandal and the wiping of hard drives in the premier’s office just as Wynne took over from her predecessor, Dalton McGuinty.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this. At election time, voters need to consider not just a party’s policies, but also its integrity and fitness for office. Sometimes that means tough choices. While even Horwath has stopped short of accusing Wynne of personal corruption, it is obvious that some Ontario Liberals made appalling choices and engaged in disgraceful conduct.

The dilemma progressives face is that any Liberal voter who switches to the NDP because of the corruption issue may be lowering the bar for Tim Hudak to attain power.

How terrible would it be if Hudak were allowed to wreak the crazy, ill-consider havoc he proposes when the overwhelming majority of us want something quite different?

Follow Paul Adams on Twitter @padams29

Paul Adams is a veteran of the CBC, the Globe and Mail and EKOS Research. He has taught political science at the University of Manitoba and journalism at Carleton. His book Power Trap explores the dilemma of Canada’s opposition parties.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.