The entry on Friday of Patrick Brown into the race to succeed Patrick Brown as leader of Ontario’s Progressive Conservative Party is, under the circumstances, unlikely to improve the quality of debate on any subject other than Patrick Brown and the multiple and varied allegations he faces.

That’s a shame. Listening to the PC leadership hopefuls debate how best to respond to the supposed challenges of our time, it was sometimes hard to figure out what world they were describing.

Not Ontario, surely.

The positions staked out by the then-four aspiring PC premiers consistently ignored or denied the realities of this province, eschewing the progressive-conservatism of the party’s erstwhile platform, the People’s Guarantee, in favour of something more like willful blindness.

The minimum wage hike now being phased in by the Wynne government is regrettable, they agreed, unnecessary and recklessly implemented. Doug Ford even suggested it was bad for minimum-wage earners! No mention of the fact that the previous minimum wage, $11.40 per hour, was too low to keep workers out of poverty, even if they worked full time. No mention of the plentiful evidence that wage hikes are rarely the job killer they are purported to be. No mention of the significant benefits for economic growth of increased demand or of the corrosive effects of growing inequality.

None of this is surprising, but nor is it inevitable. The People’s Guarantee, which recognized that too many Ontarians are not sharing in the province’s prosperity, proposed to phase in the hike to $15 per hour not by 2019, as the Wynne government is planning, but by 2022. Only Caroline Mulroney stood by this proposal, which might be described as both progressive and conservative; the others all promised to freeze the minimum wage at its current level of $14 per hour.

On carbon pricing, the candidates had already made their nonsensical consensus clear. None supports the carbon tax proposed by the People’s Guarantee, though the revenues thus raised were supposed to pay for everything else in the platform and not one of the candidates has suggested how they will cover the $4-billion difference.

At the same time, all of the candidates would repeal Kathleen Wynne’s cap-and-trade system for pricing carbon. But a recently imposed federal law, to say nothing of the existential threat posed by climate change, requires a minimum price on carbon. Either they stick with cap-and-trade or they impose some form of carbon tax. “Neither” is literally not an option. To suggest otherwise is either ignorant or duplicitous.

“Duplicitous,” too, might describe the candidates’ claims regarding the purported folly of Ontario’s three-year-old sex-education curriculum. “Maybe they could focus a little bit more on math if they weren’t talking about anal sex in the classroom,” said one-issue candidate Tanya Granic Allen, as if the curriculum had somehow crowded out lessons on complementary angles.

In 1998, at the time of the previous update to the sex-ed curriculum, gay marriage was illegal, there were no smart phones, the word “sexting” hadn’t been invented, and the debate around consent was barely a whisper. The world has changed and sex with it. It would be irresponsible if our pedagogy did not keep up. Yet only Mulroney said she would preserve the curriculum. The rest promised to scrap it on the grounds that it is wildly unpopular (false) and was designed without consultation with parents (false).

The candidates pretended away the presence of economic unfairness in the province and its consequences. They pretended that climate change is not real, that its economic impacts are not real, and that the federal law meant to address these is not real. They pretended that parents are best placed to provide sex-education, though both common sense and the evidence suggest this is not the case.

The conservative agenda of ever-smaller government and faithfulness to “traditional values” is one the Star has never supported. Yet we have always understood that conservatism represents an important part of this country and this province and that democracy is strengthened by real debate. We would all benefit from having clear alternatives to the current government’s approach.

But these alternatives must be based on the facts of this world, of this Ontario. When candidates ignore or distract from our real problems or offer pandering solutions to invented ones, both party and province suffer.

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