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When Stephen Harper was prime minister, he put considerable effort into keeping radicals from viewing the party as home. Conservatism doesn’t need extremism to succeed, and public support declines the closer a candidate gets to the fringes. That should have been evident by the desultory results of hardline social conservatives and anti-immigrant candidates in the bid to succeed Harper.

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Far from learning a lesson, Ford is doing what he can to encourage the invective. In his zeal to probe into the darkest corners of his Liberal predecessors’ misuse of public funds, Ford has all but accused individual ministers of sneaking into the Treasury on weekends and making off with stacks of 20s.

“A lot of the Liberals got rich, really, really rich” from the Liberals’ eagerness to reward their cronies, he told a caucus meeting called to announce a special committee would be formed to investigate “Liberal waste and scandal.”

“Kathleen Wynne and the Liberals lied to all of us and we all know that if you lie on your taxes, if you lie on your mortgage, if you lie on your car loan, there are consequences. You don’t just get to walk away,” he said.

It’s painfully evident Liberals abused their position, treating public money like a bank machine

It’s painfully evident Liberals abused their position, treating public money like a bank machine able to spit out endless funds for agenda items and vote-buying endeavours. None of it was a secret, however. That was what made it so infuriating: Ontario’s auditor-general and the Financial Accountability Office made clear just how brazenly Wynne’s government was manipulating numbers, running up the deficit and gulling the public with its self-serving spending habits. The Liberals were caught time and again in irresponsible practices: selling access to the premier and top cabinet members in return for “donations;” trying to use Ontario Power Generation books to hide loans taken out to subsidize power bills; and freezing out the auditor-general when she caught on to their accounting schemes.