Former Oakville North— Burlington candidate Alvin Tedjo launches his campaign for leader of the Ontario Liberal Party in May 2019. (Supplied by Tedjo campaign)

In March 2020, the Ontario Liberal Party will select a new leader. In the coming weeks, iPolitics will be profiling candidates in the running about their visions for the party and their campaigns.

Alvin Tedjo is prepared to ruffle some feathers.

Tedjo, one of six candidates gunning for leader of the Ontario Liberal Party, punctuates discussion about his platform with more abstract ideas — the “mainstream political norm” as he sees it, for example, versus what he calls “the mainstream ethos.” Those phrases sprung forward while discussing a chief component of Tedjo’s pitch to voters, which is a merging of Ontario’s public and Catholic school systems.

“Since I was born, in the ’80s, this has been an issue. And every government, of every political stripe, has been afraid to talk about it because they’re afraid of political backlash,” Tedjo claimed in a recent interview with iPolitics, discussing his bid for leader. “Certainly I’ve run into some people that said, ‘well, I don’t think this is a good idea,’ (but) most of those people are saying they don’t think it’s a good idea politically. They’re not saying they don’t think it’s a good idea morally, ethically, or policy wise.”

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Tedjo cites a November poll from public opinion form Abacus Data to back his campaign pledge. The survey of 785 voting-aged Ontarians — which had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.6 per cent, 19 times out of 20 — found 56 per cent support for merging the Catholic and public school systems in Ontario. One in four strongly supported the idea, and on the other side, one in 10 surveyed Ontarians were strongly opposed to it. The strongest opposition came, predictably, from Ontario’s Catholic population, as 45 per cent of provincial Catholics opposed consolidation and 15 per cent said they were unsure. (Forty per cent of Catholics supported the idea.)

Despite pushback, though, it would be tricky to claim that Tedjo opposes Catholic education in Ontario wholesale; his children are currently enrolled in the system themselves.

“They have a great education. I love what they’re getting. But what they’re getting is exclusive to them, because a) they’re Catholic, and b) my wife has French language rights. So we had four times the amount of choices than any other family in Ontario,” Tedjo said. “I don’t see how that’s fair at all. If we opened it up, everyone would have access to that high quality education. We’re trying to raise the bar.”

Other candidates have rejected Tedjo’s pitch. In a recent interview with iPolitics, contender and MPP Michael Coteau said such a merger wasn’t among his priorities, alleging that such a move would stoke division if pursued right now. (The PCs’ education minister, Stephen Lecce, has also publicly rebuked the idea.) Tedjo pushes back against that sort of criticism. “If not now, when, and if not us, who?” he posed.

Tedjo takes a similar stance on basic income — that more extensive action is warranted. While other candidates have supported a revival of Ontario’s basic income pilot project, Tedjo is pushing for a permanent program to be launched right away: a $17,000 income floor that he hopes they could begin implementing immediately if they formed government.

He proposes scrapping the income supplement programs from ODSP and Ontario Works to pay for the new model, though they’d keep employment programs. The province would need Ottawa to provide them with CRA data, to create a kind of online government portal for recipients to submit their information.

Tedjo talks about his wife, who works in emergency health care, when making a case for the cost of poverty in Ontario. During her time at St. Joseph’s Health Centre, he says, she’d often encounter the same patients over and over in the emergency room, whose symptoms could be traced back to living in conditions of hardship.

“Why are we using our health-care system to treat the symptoms of poverty when we know what the cause is?” Tedjo asked — noting, as well, lost opportunity costs, costs on the justice system, and the reverberations of poverty through domestic violence.

“It just seems like, we know how to pay for it, we know how to do it, we know the benefits of it. We don’t need more studies. Let’s get off our ass and do it,” Tedjo said of a more permanent program, calling support for the pilot project a “half-measure.”

READ MORE: Ontario Liberal leadership hopeful Michael Coteau believes ‘coalitions’ will pave path to victory

Not everything would change if Tedjo led his party to form government. The transit plan with the PCs crown jewel Ontario Line wouldn’t be altered, though he says he’d want to “repatriate” the federal carbon tax to pay for it. “I’m going to have a more fulsome plan on that at some point,” Tedjo pledged in his early January interview.

But all of Tedjo’s plans, like his counterparts’, hinge on success at the March leadership convention. Tedjo’s last bid for public office, less than two years ago, fell flat — which he attributes, in part, to a split of the vote with his NDP counterpart. His home riding of Oakville North—Burlington swung Progressive Conservative in the 2018 election, as new MPP Effie Triantafilopoulos decisively clinched the seat with 25,691 votes. Tedjo meanwhile pulled in 13,487 votes, which was a tight third place behind runner-up Saima Zaidi, the NDP candidate who pulled in 13,496 votes.

The pool of delegates that will elect the next Liberal leader is smaller than the riding where Tedjo ran in 2018. The delegates will be chosen by the 37,831 members who joined the party before a deadline in early December, according to updated numbers revealed by the OLP on Monday. The Toronto Star reported Monday morning that Tedjo had sold approximately 1,000 new memberships, which came with a $20 price tag per person. Candidate Steven Del Duca was reported to have sold the most memberships, hitting a total of 14,173, followed by Coteau, who pulled in 8,500.

(Tedjo, like several of the current leadership candidates, supports exploring changes to the way the Ontario Liberals elect leaders.

“The Liberal brand has this sort of eliteness to it that we need to shed,” Tedjo told iPolitics, voicing support for measures like online voting, one vote per member, and no-cost memberships. “I was hoping we didn’t have to lose multiple elections before we realized we had to do that.”)

Tedjo conceded that his campaign didn’t have the same “networks” as Del Duca and Coteau specifically, who have both served as cabinet ministers — as did candidate Mitzie Hunter.

“Obviously as a new candidate, someone who only ran once, it’s difficult,” Tedjo said, speaking about his campaign financing. But he maintained that advocating for more radical ideas in the race gave his team a distinct opportunity to elicit donations. As of Friday morning, Tedjo said his camp was on track to hit $100,000 in contributions. “We’re hovering around that,” he said.

On Monday, his campaign confirmed they’d passed that mark.

Tedjo believes the party needs to change in terms of its engagement with voters — stressing more dialogue, more interaction, between elections. He wants to see the OLP on Reddit and WeChat.

“We need to realize that politics has changed, in the sense that we can never not be engaged in the conversations that are happening, especially on social media,” he said. He points to the PCs advertising beer-related policies on Xbox as an effective method of reaching a target audience where they are. And he stresses a needed reckoning with the political priorities of newer generations.

“We talk about boomers in a way where they’re this huge monolith of people who have always decided everything. And that’s true — because they vote more than anyone else, they’re the largest voting block, there’s more of them — and their priorities have always been Ontario’s and Canada’s priorities,” Tedjo said. “They’re still important, we still need to take care of those people. Those are my parents. But we need to understand that there is a new generation of people that now outnumber those people that have a different set of priorities … we need to give them a reason to vote for us.”

The Ontario Liberal Party leadership convention is scheduled to take place March 6 and 7, 2020.