​In the waning days of the 2014 election, I ran into a mildly depressed New Democrat in the halls of Queen’s Park. NDP leader Andrea Horwath’s announcement indicating she would not support the Liberal government’s budget had led Premier Kathleen Wynne to ask the lieutenant-governor to dissolve the legislature and call a snap election. But weeks later, only days before the people of Ontario cast their votes, polls suggested that the NDP could end up losing seats overall. Whatever Horwath had been hoping for — in the end, her party eked out as many seats as they had held pre-election — those hopes seemed increasingly distant.

So it was only natural to ask, what went wrong?

“The one f**king thing we said to those idiots,” the New Democrat said, gesturing in the direction of PC leader Tim Hudak’s office, “was not to f**king scare the s**t out of people this time.” It would have been good advice for the PCs to have heeded. Indeed, it was basically a more profane version of what Jim Wilson, the Tory MPP who succeeded Hudak, said after the dust settled.

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Hudak had promised to cut 100,000 jobs in the broader public sector before he’d even unveiled the party’s platform, and the Liberals spent the rest of the campaign beating the Tories soundly around the head with that promise. But what was more important, from the NDP’s perspective, was that, as a result, the early polls that had showed them potentially reaching the high 20s in the polls — sufficient, at least, to keep the Liberals to another minority — became a thing of the past. Anxious progressive voters, especially in Toronto, had heard Hudak’s pitch and decided to park their votes with the Liberals.

Is this explanation an attempt to absolve Horwath for a lacklustre campaign that saw even committed New Democrats criticize her? Maybe, but that doesn’t mean it’s fundamentally wrong. The basic lesson is that the Tories aren’t entirely masters of their own fates in Ontario politics. Indeed, a high-ranking Tory told me this year — 2018, not 2014 — that one of his biggest concerns about the election was that the NDP vote share would collapse, potentially putting the Liberals back in contention.

The Tories are probably ahead in the polls (notwithstanding recent events), though by how much is up for debate. But a simple numerical lead in votes cast probably won’t be enough to defeat the Liberals, if prior trends hold true this year. Tory votes tend to pile up in large majorities in rural ridings; the party, though, generally underperforms in urban areas, which are, inconveniently for the PCs, where most voters live. The Tories could be narrowly ahead in the popular vote province-wide but still come in behind the Liberals in the seat count at Queen’s Park, which is what determines who actually forms the next government.

(This is called “vote efficiency,” and the Liberal vote in 2014 was very efficient: they increased their vote share by only 1 per cent, but picked up five seats relative to the 2011 result.)

From the Tory perspective, this is where the New Democrats come in. Unless there’s a massive PC landslide (and nobody in the party currently anticipates one), it’s not going to be enough to simply get more votes than the Liberals: what the Tories need is to get more votes than the Liberals while a strong NDP peels Liberal votes off from the left.

The Liberals know this, too. They’re happy to talk about how they feel they’ve boxed in the New Democrats with a raft of left-wing policies, like the increased minimum wage and OHIP+ — Wynne may have pursued such progressive policies out of conviction, but she won the argument within her party as a result of a shared sense of self-interest.

The Tories, then, need someone who isn’t going to scare the electorate — specifically, one who isn’t going to scare nervous New Democratic nellies back into the Liberal fold. So here’s a modest proposal: once nominations close on Friday and the party has its roster of candidates, let NDP members vote in the leadership election alongside paid-up PC rank-and-file.

Naysayers will point out that the whole point of the leadership race is to let the party membership decide. Such a move would obviously and categorically violate the party’s own rules for the election. So it’s not going to happen.

But how better to ensure that the passions of the party’s base don’t sabotage its general election chances than by tempering that excitement with some NDP voters who could tell them when they’ve gone off the deep end?

The Tories need to preserve or increase their appeal to the electorate without scaring progressives into the Liberal camp. But it’s entirely possible to imagine them picking a leader whom the PC base would support, but who would end up costing the party the election (yet again) by alienating voters in the general population.

The PCs should consider who best fits the bill when choosing their leader on March 10, or the voters of Ontario will do it for them on June 7.