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Then there’s the promise to repeal the health curriculum schools have been using since 2016 and reinstate one from 1998. There might be good-faith objections to the current health curriculum. The ones you actually hear are that it teaches Grade 1s how to consent to sex and pushes Grade 3s toward sex-change surgery and tells Grade 7s that anal sex is fine. In reality, the curriculum teaches Grade 1s to respect it when someone says no, Grade 3s that you aren’t allowed to make fun of people, and Grade 7s that you can get diseases from anal sex.

The curriculum uses plain language to address squirmy subjects, but it’s 244 pages of pretty traditional ideas: Sex comes with physical and emotional risks. Being cruel to people who are different from you is not OK. Don’t text naked pictures of yourself. Eat leafy greens. Exercise. The idea that we would ditch it all based on lies is discouraging.

Photo by Chris Young / THE CANADIAN PRESS

But Ford owes his leadership to socially conservative party activists. Their support is especially precarious since he ditched their charismatic spokeswoman Tanya Granic Allen as a candidate in Mississauga on the weekend partly because, Ford was surprised to learn, she’d said unkind things about homosexuals. So here we are.

Almost as bad is a pledge to tie university funding “to the willingness of university administrators to protect free speech for all students and faculty.”

You’d think professors were getting fired every other day. Ford offers two examples of violations: a teaching assistant at Laurier, Lindsay Shepherd, whose professor-boss reprimanded her clumsily for using a video of right-wing darling Jordan Peterson (a highly paid tenured professor at the University of Toronto, Ontario’s pre-eminent university) in a tutorial, and a spat between a U of T student union and an anti-abortion group it refused to fund as a club.